


A Kritik of Pure Reason (the Suits Remix)

by midrashic



Category: X-Men (Alternate Timeline Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, Alternate Universe - Still Have Powers, Friends to Lovers, Getting Together, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, M/M, debate
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-16
Updated: 2020-07-16
Packaged: 2021-03-03 18:46:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 27,272
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24920275
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/midrashic/pseuds/midrashic
Summary: Texas: When Erik and Charles collide during their senior year of high school, they swiftly find out they make the perfect debate partners. But as secrets come out—and as they draw inexorably closer—more turns out to be at stake than the State championship.
Relationships: Erik Lehnsherr/Charles Xavier
Comments: 42
Kudos: 86
Collections: X-Men Remix 2020





	A Kritik of Pure Reason (the Suits Remix)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Amaranth42](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Amaranth42/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Suits Her Eyes](https://archiveofourown.org/works/16644554) by [Amaranth42](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Amaranth42/pseuds/Amaranth42). 



He had actually been thinking about quitting debate. New school—in the boondocks of Texas, no less—new opportunities, right? Not that he was sure what those opportunities would be. He’d played French Horn in junior high school; maybe he could pick that up again. He’d been considering this as he passed by the speech room, and happened to look inside, and saw the most beautiful boy he’d ever seen spreading, that esoteric method of speed-reading aloud, almost musical in the way it turned words to pure sound, words motoring as fast as they could cram themselves out of someone’s mouth. He was good, too; maybe 350 words per minute. Moira, bless her soul, for all that she’d been a solid partner and a killer researcher, had never been able to get past 200.

Charles loitered in the doorway of the speech room, transfixed, and froze as the boy looked up at him and met his eyes. His gaze flickered away soon enough, back onto what he was reading—it sounded like the rough draft of an affirmative argument for that year’s policy topic. But before they had, Charles had seen the blue-gray-green shimmer of his eyes and memorized them. He was already, he was coming to find, deeply in love. This wasn’t unusual for him; Moira had liked to say that he fell in love once a semester, and fell out of it just as easily. Still. He drifted onto the edges of the room as the boy finished and nodded to his partner, a skinny sophomore boy Charles recognized because he was in his advanced Physics class.

The sophomore boy was—not built for debate the way the other boy had been. He stumbled over his spreading, his voice moved up and down in pitch as he slowed, then remembered it was more important to get out the words than actually process what he was reading and sped up again (ideally, Charles knew, policy debaters would be passingly familiar with everything in their overflowing boxes of arguments and blocks for their opponents’ arguments long before they ever set foot in the debate room). The boy who’d been reading before looked frustrated; eventually, when the sophomore looked like he was about to cry, the man sitting at the teacher’s desk in the corner and chewing on the edge of a cigar said, “This isn’t going to work. Hank, you’re an extemper, not a debater. You’re good at the current events stuff and great at research, but this isn’t your forte.”

“So I switch to Lincoln-Douglass,” the boy he’d been watching before said, defeated. Values debate over a moral question—not quite as prestigious as policy, also called CX, which Charles and Moira had done at his old school, but LD was one-on-one and required no partner. Charles tilted his head, charmed by the vague hint of an accent he could hear. Maybe Pennsylvanian Dutch?

“Looks like it, kid,” the coach grunted.

“I have a suggestion,” Charles said cheerfully.

Everyone turned to him at once. The boy crossed his arms, unimpressed; a pretty blond girl, young, maybe a sophomore, too, popped a piece of bubblegum from where she was sitting on a table watching the debate drama play out. A pack of freshman lodged in a corner fidgeted. Charles got the distinct impression that he and the boy were the only two _debaters_ in the room, and wondered at this school’s speech program. Mother hadn’t exactly moved them here for the _prestige_ of it, but it was a change, to go from the bustling rigor of his old debate team to one other boy in a room that doubled as a music room half the time. Charles wheeled forward and favored the East Richardson High School speech team with his most charming smile. “Charles Xavier. I’m new.”

The coach grunted at him and pulled the cigar out of his mouth. Charles glanced up; the smoke detector had been neatly disabled. “Logan.”

“Is that a first name or last name or…?”

“It’s a name,” Logan said. “Take it or leave it.”

Was everyone in Texas so… _charming?_

“I’ve been doing CX since 9th grade,” Charles said, deciding to cut right to the chase. “And I hear you might be looking for some new blood?”

The blond girl snorted. “Where’d you hear that? If Logan could chase everyone off the speech team and smoke in peace, he totally would.”

“It’s a figure of speech,” Charles told her.

“Can you spread?” Logan asked.

Charles shrugged and smiled. “Let’s find out,” he said. He wheeled himself closer to the makeshift podium the boy had set up with a hefty paper box stuffed thick with files, all blocks for possible arguments an opponent could make. There were two more in the corner, next to a tuba. He couldn’t reach the podium, obviously, so he reached up and plucked a file from the box and held it in his lap as he read. It was a fairly standard spending block, arguing that the affirmative team’s plan (whatever it was) would divert money and attention from an act that needed to be passed, a free trade agreement that needed to be ratified… whatever. He dropped into the low register of speed-reading, and he felt the energy of the room change as they heard him, heard his steady, heartbeat-quick pace never slow or falter, the rhythm he had worked for three years to develop, doing drills with a pen in his mouth to hone his enunciation, reading his arguments over and over and over again until his mouth got used to the shape of words like _impact calculus_ and _topicality._ On a good day, his spread rate was 380 words per minute. Today was a good day.

He went for eight minutes by the slow hall clock that was claiming it was 4PM already, the length of a standard constructive speech. When he finished, no one clapped. Logan puffed out a ring of smoke and turned to the boy who’d been standing next to Charles the whole time, just like they were really partners already, scrutinizing him with such intensity that Charles had felt the heat of it on his face the whole time. “Whaddya think, Erik? Is he up to snuff?”

“He’ll do,” the boy— _Erik—_ said coldly. Charles beamed at him. He could show a little more enthusiasm for the partner who had just saved him from a solitary existence of values-debate, but he was far and away handsome enough to make up for any rudeness. “How often can you practice? Did you attend camp this summer? Do you have blocks and an aff ready to go?”

“Every afternoon except Thursday, no, and no,” Charles said. Erik sniffed, but that seemed to cheer him up, and Charles sympathized; if he’d gotten a new partner, he’d prefer them not to have any wrongheaded ideas about the best way to go about things drilled into him by a camp counselor either. “But I know the topic. Mutant rights, huh? Maybe we could… meet for coffee sometime, discuss politics?”

Erik looked at him like he was insane. “That won’t be necessary,” he said. “I’ve prepared an affirmative based around economic arguments.” Boring, but solid. “Familiarize yourself with it and the blocks I’ve prepared, and we’ll meet tomorrow—”

“Tomorrow’s a Saturday,” Logan sing-songed.

“On Monday—”

“Monday is Labor Day.”

Erik cursed. He said through gritted teeth that were very pearly and very straight, “ _Why_ does this godforsaken country have so many holidays?!”

“Not everything in life revolves around debate, kid,” Logan told him. Erik looked at him as though he’d just spouted heresy or begun speaking in tongues. Charles found it oddly charming. “Or don’t listen to me, what do I know? I’m just your coach.”

“I don’t need a coach, I need a capable partner,” Erik said sharply. He glared at Charles. “You have an extra day to get used to the plan and the blocks. Are you able to do that?”

“This isn’t my first rodeo,” Charles said, adopting the charming vernacular of the state. When in Rome, and all that. Erik rolled his eyes so hard Charles feared they might fall out of his head. The bell rang, and he swept up his mess of legal pads and pens and shoved them into a plain black falling-apart backpack whose seams someone had clearly reinforced with mismatched thread. Without another word, he— _stormed off_ was a strong phrase, but he was certainly out the door and he didn’t look back. Charles sighed. Of all the people to fall in love with this semester, it had to be him, hmm?

He turned back to the students, figuring that Logan, who was—sleeping? really?—would be no help when it came to the mundane issues of accessibility. Hank from Physics was packing up his things slowly, still looking a little shaky from the idea of spending all year with Erik as his partner. He smiled as benevolently as he could and said, faux-light, “I’m afraid I’ll need some help getting all these files to my car.”

— ⓧ —

The sophomore girl ended up finding the dolly they used at tournaments, stacking the paper boxes on it, and wheeling it out to Charles’s car beside him. “You’re really going to do it? Partner with Erik?” she asked.

“It seems that way,” Charles said cheerfully. He hadn’t been looking for an extracurricular his senior year, but, well, Cupid had pointed the way, and at least it wasn’t… football, or something else distasteful and physically impossible, at least it was an activity he knew how to do and was actually fairly good at.

“It’s just that… Erik’s _insane._ He’s only been at this school for two weeks and I think half the teachers are afraid of him. They’re always avoiding him and whispering about him in the doorways.”

“I’ve found you need a little insanity to be successful at debate,” Charles said offhandedly. “What about you? Not a debater, then?”

“God, no. Interper.” More of a theater person than a debate person, then; interpers performed duets, dramatic and humorous monologues, and the like, instead of giving speeches or arguing other people down to the ground. “Raven. Darkholme.”

“Lovely to meet you,” Charles said.

“You’re the new kid from New York, right? Hank was talking about you at lunch. Why did you move here two weeks after the school year started?”

“My father got abducted by aliens so I was sent to live with my aunt,” Charles said blandly. Raven giggled. Charles smiled at her. “It just worked out that way, I suppose. It took a while to sell our old house—” mansion— “and other boring things like that.”

“You’re…” Raven seemed to be screwing up her courage.

 _Paralyzed_ , Charles was expecting her to ask. He was not expecting her to say, “…a mutant, right?”

“I—yeah,” Charles said, startled. “How did you—”

“It’s a small town. The mutant registrar is a friend of my mom’s. I heard we were getting a new mutant at the school, and that had to be you, based on the timing.” Raven flipped her hair back out of her face. “Don’t worry,” she said a little shyly. “I’m a mutant, too. The whole team is. Logan’s also the Mutant-Human Alliance advisor, which is why half the freshman are here.”

“…Erik?”

“He’s telekinetic, or something,” Raven said. “You know how debaters twirl their pens? It’s twice as annoying when he’s not touching it.” Charles laughed at the image. He _liked_ Raven, the way she’d volunteered to help him immediately, the gossipy quiet tone she’d immediately taken, as though Charles had been invited to her inner circle. “What about you?”

“I’m a telepath. Class A. What can you do?”

Raven pinked. “I shapeshift,” she said. With a little more pride, she said, “I’m the whole reason the school has a no-hair-dye-or-other-unnaturally-occurring-hair-color-no-matter-how-you-got-it policy.”

“Impressive,” Charles said, infusing his voice with warmth, and she beamed at him again. The parking lot was sprawling—most of the students who were old enough had cars, which was a change from his old school in the city—easily the size of the campus twice over again. He led Raven to the handicapped parking space and, at her request, showed her how he worked the controls. He was used to it, this benign curiosity over how he managed everyday living—it was coming on two years since the accident—and he only found it a little grating. Raven hoisted the file boxes into the trunk of the car with unnatural strength for a girl as willowy as she appeared to be, and Charles briefly considered the idea of a debate team full of mutants. Novel. He wondered what the frightened-looking gaggle of freshmen in the corner were able to do.

When she’d loaded the tubs, Raven watched as Charles transferred himself to the front seat and hauled his chair in after him. “You seem nice,” she said.

“Thank you,” Charles said, low and warm. “You do, too.”

“Erik… he’s new, too, but by all accounts, he. Is not.” Raven shrugged. “I wouldn’t do it, if I were you.”

“Do you do duets?” Charles asked. It was one of the more common interp events; two people acting out a scene in competition against six or so other teams of two.

“I did once last year, yeah. Might do it again this year.”

“And do you have to be friends with your duet partner?”

“It helps,” Raven pointed out.

Charles smiled. “We’ll see if we’re any good together. Friendship doesn’t come into it.”

“If you say so,” Raven said doubtfully. “I just know that I wouldn’t be able to do it. All those _teeth.”_ She gave a theatrical shudder and waved him off. Charles grinned at her and sent his car rolling through the parking lot. Was it. Could it be possible that he’d made his first friend here in back-end-of-nowhere, Texas? And a mutant, too. At his New York prep school, there hadn’t been many mutants; one who had gills on the swim team, a couple in Honor Society with him. The conversation with Raven had been the most substantial talk he’d had with another mutant in years, and he found himself in an unaccountably good mood as he adjusted the radio dial on the dashboard.

The town, if you could called it back, rolled past him in low buildings and dusty roads. A gun shop, a pawn shop, a thrift store; strip malls galore. The buildings were all single or two-story, nothing like New York or Westchester; the town had grown _out_ , instead of _up_ , and there was so much space in between buildings, as though the concrete and adobe needed room to breathe. A rusted-out bike chained to a yield sign, yellow lines on the asphalt marking out lanes. The sky roiled above him; they technically lived in Tornado Alley now, though it had been a long time since a tornado had actually touched down in the city proper, but the realtor they’d hired had spoken of beautiful crashing storms and lightning streaking across the sky at night. Low thunderclouds loomed heavy and gray overhead. Charles turned up the radio.

The ramshackle Victorian house that his mother had ended up purchasing with the last of the Xavier fortune was out of place among the strip malls and cookie-cutter suburban tract homes. A rich prospector had built it at the turn of the century atop a hill that would much, much later be turned into neatly-blocked neighborhoods of single-story ranch-style houses. The siding of the house was painted a peeling lavender, and the eaves and trim a muted darker purple. Charles called it “the purple house” in his mind. He went up the wheelchair ramp, a new addition to the house that didn’t quite match the weather-lightened wood of the porch, knowing that he would have to take each tub in himself, one by one.

“Mother?” he called out. Her perfume was stale and stagnant. No one was home. Of course.

He made himself dinner—macaroni and cheese out of the box—and fell asleep in front of the boxy television set with several of the debate files spread out in front of him. When she came in, his mother didn’t wake him up.

— ⓧ —

“So,” Erik said Tuesday afternoon. Charles had dropped by the speech room; Logan was out, two of the freshmen were chatting nervously in the corner, and Erik was sitting in front of one of one of the boxy-like computers, which wasn’t yet turned on, with a mandala of files spread in front of him—blocks and kritiks and counterplans and disads, an entire constellation of evidence that they would use, if they were the team arguing the negative, to argue against the resolution. “What do you think?”

The resolution this year—the topic that they would spend all year debating—was RESOLVED: The US Federal Government should increase protections for the rights of mutant Americans. Depending on a coin flip, Erik and Charles, if they decided this partnership would work out, would either present a plan that fell under the purview of the resolution—Erik had written a fairly conservative, if standard, plan about economic stimulus for mutant communities—or argue against the plan that the affirmative had presented. Charles had spent all weekend and the holiday ensconced in his room, reading through the stacks and stacks of evidence Erik had amassed. Much of policy debate, commonly called CX for short, was preparation—anticipating the arguments you opponents would make and preparing blocks to countermand them even long before the weekend of the tournament itself. He recognized some of the files Erik had spread out in front of himself—some were new, proof that Erik had spent the weekend hard at work himself.

“I think,” Charles said, “that we need to be better prepared for the Legalism kritik, since that one’s going to get run against us a _lot_ , and while your topicality blocks are very good, I don’t think we’ll know how to flesh out the later arguments until the tournaments themselves, so best to stop trying.”

Erik stared at him for a moment, like he hadn’t actually been able to expect him to speak the jargon of debate—Charles was struck with the sense that a rock had just come to life in front of him and started speaking perfect English—and then gave a wolfish grin. “Lazy,” he said. “But you have a point. I’ve actually been doing some research on the Legalism kritik here. Take a look, tell me what you think.”

“Did you go to a camp this summer?” Charles asked. Camps were hotbeds of research and evidence-gathering, and fairly common head-starts for anyone who could afford it.

“No,” Erik muttered.

“You’re the only CX’er at this school, right? Have you done all of this research _yourself_?”

“Yes,” Erik said, color high on his cheeks. “I know it’s probably not what you’re used to—” and it wasn’t, at his previous school the coaches had split teams into tackling discrete subjects of their own, all of which went into communal team evidence tubs they used collectively to crush lesser-prepared teams, “—but we’re quite resource-poor here, not like the private schools on the circuits or the public schools with better property taxes, so we all have to pitch in. I’ve been commandeering the freshman to do basic research updating the disads with new news articles. Can you handle that, Xavier?”

It had been a while since Charles had done his own research; Moira was always the better-prepared one, Charles the charmer whose strength was in his ability to think on his feet, to analyze and determine their strategy for the the length of the debate round. Still. He thought of long evenings in the library with Erik, poring over the same books, laughing over the same things that appeared ridiculous when you’d been researching for eight hours straight, maybe a kiss—it was bad form to date your debate partners, but this team was so small, and Charles certainly wasn’t going to try to pick up one of the freshmen. “Oh,” Charles said, “it might surprise you what I can handle.”

Erik smiled at him, fierce, triumphant, the double entendre apparently having gone over his head completely. That was all right; they could work on that. “All right,” he said, and thrust a stack of papers into Charles’s hands. “Then get to work fleshing out blocks to the NAFTA disad, the vote is coming up next month and it’ll be all any of the policymakers are talking about.”

— ⓧ —

His name was Erik Lehnsherr, he had moved here from two hours away—a prestigious private school where he’d been on scholarship, for reasons he didn’t want to talk about—and he’d grown up in Germany, hence the accent. He never invited Charles to his house, only ever the public library, where he worked like a madman until closing ( _German work ethic_ , Charles thought to himself, and it was impressive and slightly frightening, the way his pale eyes darted between books and a computer screen and his fingers flew across a keyboard typing up arguments and counterarguments). He wasn’t telekinetic but metallokinetic, and he preferred heavy fountain pens instead of the plastic G2s that debaters favored for that reason. It was a sight to see, the way he would lightly balance a pen on his legal pad and then the pen would be off on its own, Erik controlling it with one half of his brain as he rifled through his evidence tubs with his hands with the other, and, Charles figured, extremely intimidating to any human teams he’d come across. Erik was a senior, like him, but he never discussed which colleges he was applying to or what he wanted to major in: he was focused, wholeheartedly, on the next tournament, and, at the end of the year, State, which in some states—including Texas—was far more prestigious than nationals, which ran on a different circuit based on school districts. Charles assumed his grades were good enough to allow him to participate in extracurriculars, but he never talked about school either, not even to grumble about a teacher or explain that he had a project and needed to cancel their daily (except for Thursday) research session. 

Two weeks, and they were on the bus to the first tournament of the year. The freshmen, who Charles had gotten to know as Jean, Scott, and Ororo, were blasting pop music near the front of the bus, getting themselves pumped for their theatrical competitions. Raven had her feet in Hank’s lap; Hank was nervously re-memorizing his oratory. (Hank was a speech nerd, like debate but less competitive; he memorized or extemporized speeches on current events or a topic of his choosing and didn’t take part in the acting-heavy events of the interpers.) Erik had taken the seat across from the wheelchair lift without even glancing at the whole affair that was getting Charles inside the bus and was now haranguing him about his failures as a researcher. It was, Charles supposed, a welcome change from the attention his chair drew at all times, whether people thought they were being discreet about it or not.

Erik was—

—well, Erik was wearing a suit, the uniform of speech tournament-goers everywhere, and no one had had to tell him this morning that men’s suits were buttoned sometimes-always-never (sometimes the top button, always the middle button, never the bottom button), the way Charles had kindly had to correct Scott. His tie was knotted neatly, blue and green pinstripes that rather, Charles thought, brought out his pale eyes. Charles felt downright dowdy in his own suit, though by all means it was better-fitting and more fashionable than Erik’s. Erik just wore everything he owned with such straight-backed confidence that he always on the edge of radiating youthful elegance, no matter if he was wearing a faded and beaten old t-shirt and jeans or an untailored speech tournament suit.

“Are you listening to me, Xavier?” Erik snapped him out of his reverie.

“No,” Charles answered honestly. Erik rolled his eyes so violently Charles feared he might sprain something. “Relax, Erik,” he said. “We’re prepared as we can be. Would’ve liked to get some more practice debates in, probably, but given it’s just the two of us in the entire school, we’ve done all we can. Sit _down_ and enjoy the music, will you?”

Erik grumbled to himself and continued rifling through one of the evidence tubs he’d brought with him to his seat. Charles watched him with fond amusement. When the bus rolled up to the deserted high school where the tournament was taking place, he let himself be lowered down and watched as Logan slowly stirred awake from where he’d been napping up front. Logan went inside to register them and came out holding a silvery bracelet. Charles sighed.

“Charles,” Logan said, holding it up.

Charles rolled forward to him, holding out his wrist, and Logan buckled it for him. Immediately, the world dulled, and a headache began to pulse in the back of his head. He fumbled in his pack for the ibuprofen he’d stashed for precisely this—the moment in which the power inhibitor turned on and his telepathy lashed back at him, incensed at not being able to probe the world the way in which he was used to.

“What’s that?” Raven asked.

Charles glanced at Logan in case he wanted to explain. He shouldn’t have bothered; Logan grunted and strolled away, maybe to get him a table in the cafeteria but more likely to fuck off to the judges’ lounge. He seemed the type to abandon them to their own devices all day, no matter that he was technically there as a chaperone. “It’s a power inhibitor,” he said.

“What?” Raven said, aghast. “Like they use in jails?”

“Much milder, thank goodness, and I can take it off whenever I want.”

“Then why—”

“It’s to prevent telepathic cheating,” Erik said from behind him. He was pushing the dolly, their evidence tubs stacked high, nearly as tall as he was. “Texas Forensic Association regulations.” He was looking at Charles, and for once, something other than fierce determination was showing in his eyes. “You all right?”

Charles nodded, rubbing at his temples. He smiled at Erik. “I’m used to it,” he said.

“That wasn’t an answer.”

“Why, Erik,” he said, “are you worried about me?”

Erik scowled. “No,” he bit out, and turned on his heel, taking the tubs of evidence with him. Smiling, Charles followed him inside.

Schools were always different on the weekends: as though everyone had gone for a fire drill or something, and left the posters, three corners tacked to bulletin boards or walls and one flapping in the air conditioning, the empty desks completely devoid of any sign of personality save maybe a carved name or a clod of gum on the underside, the chalkboards with equations or dates unerased as though the teacher would be back any second. It made him think of disaster sites, whole communities and families had just up and left at once; maybe an exodus from Egypt, no time to let the bread dough rise. He felt like an anthropologist, combing through the remains of lives abandoned, or maybe a ghost, the world frozen in the moment of death.

Signs led them to the cafeteria, where representatives from more than a dozen schools, nearly all teams bigger than their own, were milling around, checking the brackets that had been posted, warming up their monologues and speeches. Hank was off—extemp started thirty minutes earlier than everything else. He would draw a topic, something along the lines of “Will the Vice President’s visit to China undermine hopes of ratifying the North American Free Trade Agreement?” and have thirty minutes to prepare a persuasive speech on it before he competed against others who had drawn similar topics and drafted and memorized speeches in the same amount of time. Charles had done extemp a few times, and had always done well.

But you couldn’t compete in any events besides CX; it was too consuming, two hours for every debate not to mention what it did to your social life. CX’ers spent their entire tournaments closeted in classrooms, spreading themselves hoarse, with only a brief lunch break to scarf down some lukewarm pizza that was being sold at the concessions stand in the cafeteria. Charles stayed near the table they’d staked out as their territory and the evidence tubs as Erik elbowed his way to the postings at the front of the room to see which classroom they’d been assigned, and who they would be debating. He wondered if Erik knew any of the teams here. Probably not, given how far away his old school was, unless they’d gone to State and he’d met them there.

“B24,” Erik said when he’d forced his way back through the thronging crowd. “Let’s go.”

— ⓧ —

Policy debate worked like this: the affirmative team presented a plan, a more specific version of the resolution, and explained its advantages. Then the negative team attempted to show how the plan would do more harm than good, by refuting the advantages, but also through a variety of moves. They could claim that the plan wasn’t topical, that the resolution specifically meant something else; they could argue that the disadvantages, or disads, of the plan outweighed the advantages; they could present a counterplan that claimed the advantages of the plan but none of the disadvantages; or they could challenge a fundamental tenet of the plan’s assumptions with a kritik. Each debater spoke for eight minutes, then had a five-minute rebuttal speech during which they couldn’t introduce new arguments. 

It was a Saturday-only tournament, so they’d have three rounds of preliminary debates, followed by elimination rounds for the highest-scoring teams. Charles expected that they’d be there late into the night; they hadn’t practiced much together, but he could already tell that Erik’s incisive mind and Charles’s analytic ability would be formidable.

 _If,_ he advised to himself later, they were in sync; which they most definitely were not.

They conquered the first team easily, a pair of cringing sophomores that reminded Charles, pitifully, of Hank, and though Erik was downright rude during cross-examination, drawing a frown from the judge, Charles still had hope. Then they hit a junior-senior team from a well-prepared private school, and things just sort of—fell apart.

Their hands struck when they reached for the same file in the evidence tub. They argued, fiercely, over whether to take a utilitarian approach and focus on the inaccuracies of their opponent’s argument (Erik) or try a kritik, a critical theory argument that challenged one of the opposing team’s hidden assumptions (Charles). They wasted precious prep time in an argument that grew steadily fiercer, an argument that culminated in Erik slamming his fist on the table, startling judge, opponents, and Charles, who was trying very hard not to be turned on by the intensity in Erik’s eyes. Charles dropped a key argument in his rebuttal; Erik shoved a note that read COUNTERPLAN GODDAMNIT into his hand when he had thirty seconds left, but by then it was too late; the worst part, Charles conceded glumly, was that the junior had a habit of letting his sentences trail off and if they’d been even a little more organized they could’ve easily crushed the pair of them. Loss was one thing; losing when you shouldn’t was something else entirely.

“What is _wrong_ with you?” he hissed at Erik as they gathered up their evidence and tossed it back in the tubs as the team, celebrating, turned away.

“Me?” Erik fumed. “What’s wrong with you? You _know_ that an unaddressed argument is conceded, you should’ve known better to drop the counterplan—”

“Yes, all right, my bad, I’m rusty,” Charles said. “But you—you look like you’re constantly on the verge of a stroke. Calm down, Erik. It won’t do you any harm to just—” he laid a hand on Erik’s elbow— “breathe.”

Erik threw his grip off with a wild look in his eyes. “ _Don’t_ ,” he snapped, “tell me to _breathe_ ,” and stormed off. At least he took the tubs with him. Charles hadn’t been looking forward to maneuvering the dolly with the tubs, thirty pounds of paper inside each, along with a wheelchair.

— ⓧ —

They made it to octofinals by the skin of their teeth, but they weren’t going to earn any state qual points at this tournament, which incensed Erik even further. Logan seemed unperturbed by their failure. Raven had made it to dramatic interp finals, and if one person stayed until the awards ceremony, they all had to stay, as they’d come on a bus together. “You all right, kid?” Logan asked as they waited for the awards to be passed out. Erik had stormed off somewhere, but he slunk back in to support Raven, which surprised and touched Charles; if Raven hadn’t been a burgeoning friend, he might not have bothered himself; it was a common enough attitude for CX’ers that their time was better spent watching an elimination round and taking notes about successful strategy than supporting their speech and interper fellows at the awards ceremony. (Yes, CX semifinals and finals were still going on, even as they handed out awards to everyone else; they would probably go on late into the night, the very last event before the schools who were lucky enough to have successful teams could go home.)

“I suppose,” Charles said. “Just frustrated.”

Logan huffed a chuckle. “Sounds about right,” he said. “Erik’s a good debater, but he gets… heated. Frenzied. It loses him rounds, because he makes mistakes, and because no one wants to award a win to a crazy teenager. No surprise,” he said, more to himself than to Charles, and Charles’s ears pricked up with the sensation of a secret passing just overhead. “I figured you’d be a good match for him. I could tell you’re the calm type from the moment you rolled into the classroom, easy as anything. As though you genuinely didn’t care about whether or not he took you on as a partner.”

“He doesn’t listen to me,” Charles complained.

“So make him,” Logan said unsympathetically. “I don’t know what the hell you want _me_ to do, kid, he doesn’t listen to me, either.”

“Aren’t you supposed to be his coach?”

“Kid, have you ever met a debate coach who did anything but bring the gatorade?”

“Yes.”

“Well, welcome to Texas,” Logan said, and adjusted the brim of his cap so he could nap while the awards ceremony went on. His eyes flickered open in time for them to see Raven win a tiny third prize trophy in dramatic interp; he grunted with approval and patted her shoulder as she beamed down at him. Out of the corner of his eye, Erik slipped back into the darkened hallways of the school, probably to go catch the final CX round. Instead of following him, Charles rested his chin on his folded hands and thought about incentivizing good behavior.

— ⓧ —

“I think it’s performance anxiety,” Charles said cheerfully, wheeling up to Erik in the cafeteria. Erik was sitting alone, a copy of _East of Eden,_ which the Honors Seniors were reading for English, propped up against his water bottle.

“What,” Erik said blankly. He glanced around. “Do you… want to practice?”

“No,” Charles said, “I want to talk to you about practicing. I think it’s performance anxiety. Why you’re such a massive prick during tournaments; more than you usually are, I mean.”

“I’m not—” Erik said self-consciously, but color was already flaring to life on his cheeks, Charles noticed, enthralled.

“You are,” Charles said, “and it’s all right, except I think it’ll cost us our chance at qualifying for State if we don’t get our act together. So no more research, except what we need to do to refresh the disads; from now on, it’s mock debates all the way.”

“We don’t have another team to debate against,” Erik pointed out.

“We’ll go maverick against each other,” Charles said cheerfully. “It’ll be fun.”

“Fun,” Erik said doubtfully, as though he’d never heard of such a thing in his life.

It _was_ fun, actually, although they got kicked out of the public library for being too loud, so instead they set up their tubs on the benches outside, doing pen drills to warm up, reciting their affirmative argument with a pen in their mouths to enhance enunciation, and then pulling out all the stops in full debates against each other. As the September wind whipped roses into their cheeks, Charles learned more about Erik’s debating style in two weeks than he might have in a year without any mock debates. Erik was aggressive, yes, and condescending during cross-examination, and too reliant on utilitarian arguments while sacrificing critical arguments, but he was also fast, and brilliant, and had a talent for noticing _exactly_ when an opponent had contradicting themselves. When Erik got too angry, Charles stopped the debate and let Erik swear at him for a while, and slowly the fits of fury grew fewer and farther between. 

During breaks, they walked-rolled to the KFC a few blocks over and came back to sit outside the library, flanked by the gargoyles, eating fried chicken with the ravenous hunger of teenage boys who had been thinking too hard all afternoon. Slowly, Charles pried personal details out of Erik. The music he liked. That he’d been born in Germany, and emigrated to the United States when he was eight. (He tried, in vain, to get details about what eight-year-old Erik had been like out of him, but Erik was a stone wall when it came to the embarrassing or cute.) That he’d used to write poetry.

“Poetry?!” Charles had sputtered out.

“Yes,” Erik muttered. “What of it?”

“I just—didn’t figure you to be the type,” Charles said, warm and gentle. Something about his tone loosened the tightness in Erik’s shoulders, and he turned minutely back toward Charles. “What did you write? Sonnets? Villanelles?”

“Free verse,” Erik mumbled. “Spoken word.”

“Ah!” Charles clapped his hands with delight. Erik shoved a chicken wing into his mouth to avoid having to look at him. “Have you ever thought about poetry slams? Competing?”

“No,” Erik said. “It’s not… for that. Besides, I don’t write anymore.”

“Why not?” Charles asked, pouting. He wanted to see Erik’s poetry. He wanted Erik to write _him_ poetry, although that was an absurd impulse, that was the height of fucking selfishness.

“No time,” Erik grunted. “Too much research and practice to do.”

Charles thought of Logan telling Erik, as gently as he ever got, _Not everything in life revolves around debate, kid,_ and ached. He wants to know. He wants to know what transformed Erik from a regular teenager into a debate machine. But he couldn't just ask; Erik is already throwing away the carton of fried chicken and turning to Charles with a manic gleam in his eye. “All right,” he says. “Let’s do the rebuttals now. You dropped the counterplan again.”

“Counterplans are stupid and illegitimate,” Charles grumbled.

“Kritiks are worse,” Erik fired back. 

“Fighting words,” Charles said with a smile, but wheeled back to the makeshift podium Erik had constructed for him out of a bench and a tub. “I’ll make a believer out of you yet.”

— ⓧ —

October. They’d made it to semifinals once and finals once, and they were starting to rack up state qual points: the higher in the tournament rankings they made it, the more state qual points they earned, with a minimum of ten to qualify for state. Charles estimated that if they continued at this rate, they would easily qual for state, but that they had better start winning tournaments if they actually wanted to get past the first round there. There were plenty of teams that made it to State without ever winning a tournament; much fewer teams, however, who ended up winning the comically large CX trophy without having won their share of tournaments first.

Erik didn’t mellow, exactly, but his intensity, which used to flare up at unpredictable intervals and lash out at everyone around them, including the judge and Charles, seemed to more and more likely be under his tight control, so that the only sign that something might be rippling beneath the surface was the way which he snatched his pen out of the air to clench it, white-knuckled, and the pace at which he spoke, spreading even faster than Charles had seen him those months before in the speech room.

At the Grapevine tournament, an opponent in quarterfinals took one look at Charles’s suppression collar and Erik’s gently floating pen and smirked. And then, after Erik had made his standard first constructive argument for the affirmative about how increasing economic stimulus for mutant communities would solve the US economy and prevent global economic collapse, their opponent, a thinly-mustached boy, stood up and stared reading a _human supremacy K._

“Turn: the plan is immoral because it claims to legislate _Homo sapiens superior,_ ” the boy spat the proper name of mutants with venom, “when human governments were created and intended to work toward the service and welfare of _homo sapiens_ alone. Impact: illegitimate governmental overreach leads to state collapse, leads to thermonuclear war. See Krasinsky ‘72 evidence—”

In other words, their fairly basic plan would cause the collapse of human government when it was put into practice and illegitimately used human resources on mutant causes. Even Charles paused; this was a twist on the Legalism K so unique in its bigotry that he hadn’t been expecting it. Most CX judges were technically _prepared_ to consider all arguments, but it was held in good faith that discrimination was always ideological and had no political benefits; to argue that human supremacy was moral in utilitarian terms because otherwise global governance would collapse was… ballsy. Even Charles felt his mouth drop open for a moment before he returned to his flow, the notes he took to keep track of the rapid-fire arguments spat out during a round.

Next to him, Erik clenched his fist and his nice fountain pen crumbled into a little unusable ball.

“Erik,” Charles hissed.

“Fine,” Erik snapped under his breath, and took a moment to pull a different metal-cased pen out of his bag, set it on the legal pad, and let it start flowing by itself.

The convention was for the partner who just spoke to cross-examine the opponent, so that the partner who was speaking next had more time to prepare. Erik stood stiffly. His tie was askew from where he’d been yanking on it in agitation during the first negative constructive speech, but he didn’t straighten it; someone had trained all tics and habits out of him, aside from the pen-twirling, with prejudice. “Can you elaborate on the origin of your phraseology,” he said bluntly, less a question than a demand. “Specifically _homo sapiens and homo sapiens superior.”_

“They’re binomial names,” the kid said self-importantly, “introduced by Carl Linneas in his taxonomy of the kingdoms of life.”

“Actually, I think you’ll find _homo sapiens superior_ is a _tri_ nomial name,” Erik said dryly. “Given that it has three parts. And I highly doubt that Carl Linneas referred to mutants any more than I doubt that Carl Linneas referred to HIV; they just didn’t exist in the eighteenth century.”

“Fine,” the kid conceded. “ _Homo sapiens superior_ is a self-aggrandizing trinomial coined by mutant supremacist geneticists in the 70s.”

Erik broke another pen. Charles thought about slipping him a note to calm down, but Erik likely knew. Their opponents’ strategy was clear now: enrage the mutant freaks enough that they wouldn’t be able to hold a coherent debate, and win by default. Risky, but potentially high-reward, if they managed to piss off Charles and Erik enough that their speaker points—a tiebreaker measure based on how well they spoke, not argued—took a hit, robbing them of any speaker awards they might have. Erik bared his teeth, breathed slowly through them, and said, “And yet you argue that governments, prior to the recognition of mutants as an extant phenomenon, much less a separate species, are built on the _exclusion of mutants._ ”

“The exclusion of nonhumans,” the kid said. “Which mutants are.”

“So—let me just clarify this—the coherent identity of government as an institution is based off of a sense that humans are a legislatable entity, and nonhumans are not—even prior to the understanding of humans as a biological species, you’re claiming a sort of Platonic sense of humanity that _can_ be subject to a social contract—”

“Don’t put words in my mouth—”

“Let’s move on,” Erik said smoothly, and Charles—relaxed a little. That he wouldn’t fight it out, wasn’t growing increasingly hot and determined to get out what he had to say, that was a good sign. Also, that had been a good argument; Charles pulled up the legal pad on which he was drafting his next speech, the 2AC, the second affirmative constructive, and added _non-Enlightenment understanding of humans as divine creation, not mechanical species—no link._ “So any legislation of mutants will cause the collapse of society.”

“Any legislation specifically recognizing that mutants are distinct from humans, and therefore implying an inherent lack of legislatibility on the part of mutants.”

“Why not the Ries Act? Which draws a distinction between mutant-owned and human-owned businesses in how they can apply for tax breaks?”

“The Ries Act is specific to Massachusetts.”

“And the plan is specific to the United States, but I’d just like to point out that Massachusetts as a government hasn’t collapsed yet.”

“The effect is cumulative—”

“So you admit that your link is non-unique?”

“ _But_ your plan will be a tipping point because of the way it is embedded in both budget matters and discrimination law.”

“Hm.” Erik was spinning his pen again. That was a good sign. “What about animals?”

“What about—what?”

“What about legislation referring to animals as distinct from humans? Why hasn’t that caused society to collapse?”

“I—”

Charles stifled a smile behind his hand. Erik was calm now—all those mock debates had done some good after all—and was relishing it, having cornered a bigot in a trap of his own making. Beside him, the boy’s partner had buried her face in a hand, and was tapping her pen pointedly on where she’d written out an answer for him—probably older, probably more seasoned. The boy flushed and picked it up and read off a somewhat outlandish statement about every single law that had ever referred to animals actually legislating human behavior, not animal behavior. “Hmmm,” Erik said forbiddingly, and Charles added another note to his next speech, while digging through the evidence tubs for the counter-Kritik decrying mutant-human segregation he wanted. They were going to win this one.

— ⓧ —

The next day, a Sunday, Charles woke thinking his mother was knocking on his door. “Mum?” he called out sleepily. No answer. He transferred himself hastily to his chair and rolled to the closed bedroom door, sticking his head out; no one. He sighed. Dreaming again.

Then a clatter against his window; the same noise that had woken him up. Baffled, he shoved open the dormer window above his desk and stuck his head out to narrowly dodge another pebble that had been lobbed up at him from Erik, on his bike, on the ground below.

“Oh good,” he said, “I’ve been chucking rocks at random windows for twenty minutes. Come downstairs.”

“What are you _doing_ here?” Charles said, still not sure if he was totally awake yet.

“Need to talk to you about beefing up our K blocks.”

“How do you even know where I live?”

“I broke into the registrar’s office to find your address,” Erik said blithely.

“You— _what?”_ Charles spluttered, but he was grinning. He’d come to expect this kind of thing from Erik, but it baffled and delighted him every time.

Erik looked at him as though _he_ were the one having a totally inappropriate response to the situation. “I won’t tell anyone else. Get downstairs.”

Charles invited Erik into the kitchen, where he made pancakes. He couldn’t hear his mother moving around upstairs, so she was probably out again. Erik was crunching on a late fall apple, pearled with white patches, as he went over again the nerve of the team that had tried to corner them with a human supremacy K yesterday. It was the third time Charles had had this conversation this weekend alone. “We beat them, didn’t we?” Charles asked wearily.

“But we need to be better _prepared_ ,” Erik said firmly. 

He pulled out an expanding file of key evidence, smaller than an evidence tub but hefty to bike around with nevertheless, and Charles groaned as he flipped a blueberry pancake. “Do you dream about debate?” Charles asked. “Do you write your English papers about debate? I have _never_ seen someone more obsessed with anything, and I used to know a few coin collectors in my misspent youth.”

“Yes and yes,” Erik said distractedly. “A persuasive English essay is just an aff about _Moby Dick._ Do you want to hear what I dreamed last night?”

“Absolutely not.”

“I dreamed that you were the perfect partner, and that when I came over to your house the day after a tournament to review our failures and successes, you didn’t whine about it.”

“I’m making you pancakes, aren’t I?” Charles grumbled.

“Yes,” Erik said consideringly. “Yes, that is a point in the real you’s favor.” He smiled a surprisingly sweet and lovely smile as Charles laid out a plate of pancakes drizzled in maple syrup before him, causing Charles to fumble the fork. Damn this boy. He didn’t even know how charming he was.

— ⓧ —

November, and they were… dare he say it… becoming _friends._ From what he remembered about being a freshman who lost more often than he won, the most intense bonding moments on a debate team happened when elim rounds were going on, and you couldn’t go home, so you staked out a little corner of the empty school with your burgeoning friends and made confessions to each other as the school gently darkened into a school at night, and indeed, Scott, Ororo, and Jean were increasingly inseparable.

But he and Erik, who made it to elim rounds regularly, began, in a rare instance of slacking off on Erik’s part, to find alcoves and corners of their own to hole up in and quietly practice instead of watching semifinal or final rounds after they’d been eliminated, the way they probably ought to have done. Charles bought them dollar-pizza from the canteen and they drank sodas, no longer having to watch out for the way the sugar would contract their throats since they weren’t speaking competitively anymore, and they talked about debate but also about other things. Mostly it was Charles bringing up the other things, but Erik nodded at him and listened with feigned indifference but for the intensity with which he watched Charles, which could only be genuine. Charles complained about teachers, talked through college applications, shared his hopes and dreams to Erik, who drank them in quietly and never told another soul about the things Charles confessed to him on these afternoons-darkening-to-evenings. Who would he tell? He barely even spoke to the others on their debate team, spoke even less to anyone who wasn’t on it.

In a moment of nerdy delight one Saturday early in November, when they’d been debating since the afternoon before and a moment of inattention on Charles’s part from lack of sleep had lost them the quarterfinal round, Charles was telling Erik about how NASA had released their new shuttle design, which heavily featured adamantium supports. Adamantium was dangerous to use: hard to shape, harder to keep it from tearing through other metals like so much tissue paper. But recent breakthroughs in materials science had suggested that _organic alloys_ of adamantium would be much easier to control… “You’re not listening,” Charles realized with a hint of disappointment.

“No,” Erik said distractedly. “Go on. NASA, adamantium, blah, blah.”

Charles huffed and stopped pacing his chair back and forth down the hallway, wheeled up next to where Erik was sitting on a tub, his nose stuck in a disad. “You could pay a little more attention to scientific news about metals,” he said, put out. “You’re a metallokinetic, after all.”

Erik lowered the file, but it was only to say, blankly, “What does that have to do with anything?”

“What does—do you not have a favorite metal?”

“Do you have a favorite mind?”

 _Yours,_ Charles wanted to say, but refrained. “Do you not pay attention at all to the science that explains what you control? _How_ you control it? I know I read the psionic news obsessively.”

“You read all news obsessively,” Erik said, a hint of fondness in his voice.

“Is this an attractive quality?” Charles wondered. “The caring about debate to the exclusion of human feeling?”

“Is it an attractive quality, sticking your nose in everywhere?” Erik fired back.

“Actually, yes,” Charles said, and launched into a story about how his ex, Gabrielle, had agreed to go out with him after they’d mounted an investigation into who had spread a rumor about her waxing her upper lip and Charles’s detective skills had uncovered that it was not the jockish ex-boyfriend but the bitchy cheerleader he’d been dating and in whose presence he’d accidentally moaned Gabrielle’s name in an inopportune moment. Erik finally put down his file, a little astonished, and laughed and looked moved at all the right moments. Charles was an excellent storyteller; it was what made him such a good debater. 

“And that’s how I got to second base with Gabrielle Haller,” he finished triumphantly. Erik was laughing at him, just a silent giggle, but it captivated Charles; he fixated on Erik’s dimples, the way he clapped his hand over his mouth like any sound would be a betrayal, the way he huffed gentle breaths of laughter through his fingers. He looked—not _good_ when he laughed, but young. He looked his age, even though he was wearing a suit with a crooked tie and never smiled unless he was about to demolish someone, he looked like someone approachable, someone who might let himself be loved.

“Charles,” Erik said fondly, “you’re terrible.”

Charles leaned his head back against the wall and examined the BE THE CHANGE YOU WANT TO SEE IN THE WORLD poster across from them. The locker behind his head bristled with magnets and decals. “Your turn,” he said.

“My turn for what?”

“A story about an ex,” Charles said. “Surely, a handsome boy like you, you have a couple?”

Watching Erik clam up was like watching a hermit crab scuttle back into its shell. At once, he straightened; at once, the mirth faded from his face. He glanced down at his hands, where he was shuffling the files he’d only moments ago forgotten about entirely. “No,” he said shortly. “Drop it.”

“What—really?” Charles said, too astonished to heed the warnings signs. “Have you really never even—” _kissed someone,_ Charles was about to say, but Erik stood abruptly, his hands clenching on the files and bending the manilla folder they were encased in, and started throwing things back into the evidence tub. That was something to appreciate, at least, Charles noted wearily when Erik had stormed off again, pushing the dolly laden with their tubs back to the cafeteria or the awards ceremony or some other lonely alcove. He’d never once left the boy in the wheelchair to move all their evidence when they parted ways angrily. That was something.

— ⓧ —

At the University of Texas tournament in the new year, State in small-scale—

Erik was tense from the moment they stepped off the bus. He went off to check the postings that assigned room numbers and debate times, then stared blankly at Charles when he asked what room they were in, and had to go back and check again. He walked around with an even grimmer set to his mouth than usual, and nothing Charles could do could cajole him back into the shy but real smiles he’d exchanged with Charles at the last tournament. It wasn’t the thing about past relationships, that had been over and done with two tournaments ago, and Charles had put his foot in his mouth plenty of times since then, and Erik had just rolled his eyes and fixed Charles with a grim, solid stare that had him fidgeting. This was… something else.

Erik was feral again, picking at the weak spots of his opponent’s case and tearing into them with an fierceness that frightened Charles, their opponents, and the judge. They won the first round, lost the second, and Charles suspected it was a matter of whether or not their judge appreciated or dismissed Erik’s intensity that would get them to elims or not. “No,” he said firmly, when Erik, in the cafeteria, made for Round 3 postings looking fully like he was going to elbow anyone who got in his way. “I will look at the postings. You… chill out. Don’t kill anyone,” he added forbiddingly. Erik sat down stiffly, his eyes scanning the huge university hall with a ferociousness—no—a nervousness—that made Charles want to keep him close and pry all his secrets out of him with gentle fingers and kindness.

They were hitting Frost-Chertov, from a small private school Charles had never heard of before, in Room 214, Elk Hall. Charles gathered up Erik, who gathered up the evidence tubs, and headed over to Elk Hall, which was across the quad from the cafeteria. They had to look for a wheelchair ramp, which was stashed at the back of the hall. “It discomfits me,” Charles said quietly, “the idea of college visits. I hate learning new layouts.”

Erik glanced down at him and said nothing, but Charles knew he’d read between the lines: _It discomfits me, the thought of college in a wheelchair._ He adjusted his grip on the dolly and held the door open for Charles, who nodded semi-gratefully at him.

They got as far into the hallway in question before Erik saw who was waiting outside the classroom for them and stopped dead. Charles rolled right into him, which couldn’t have been pleasant for Erik and definitely wasn’t for Charles, but Erik’s expression was twisted into so much shock and resignation before it shuttered, blank, that he didn’t complain, didn’t smack Erik’s hip and tell him to watch where he was going. Erik was staring at the couple that must have been Frost and Chertov, their opponents. One was a pretty blond girl wearing the same suppression bracelet as Charles was—another telepath? One was a physical mutant with red skin and a whipping red tail that contrasted with his sleek black hair. They were both older—seniors, maybe—they looked less like children playing dress-up in their parents’ professional clothes and more like young professionals themselves. Their gazes passed right over Charles, dismissing him, which he was used to, and landed on—Erik, drinking him in with equal parts interest to Erik’s horror.

“See, Emma,” the red-skinned mutant said, his accent faint and wisping around the edges of his words, like Erik’s, “I told you. Who else has the last name ‘Lehnsherr’?”

The girl examined her nails. “I just thought it was more likely to be a coincidence than the shattered remnants of Erik Lehnsherr’s dignity, which is a fair shot.”

“Do you—know them?” Charles said, bewildered. Had he gone up against them before at his old school? There were a few teams like that, but none had addressed Erik with such familiarity, such—contempt.

“Emma,” Erik said through gritted teeth, ignoring Charles entirely. “Azazel.”

“Erik,” Emma said smoothly. “It’s… _good_ to see you again.” Azazel nodded. Erik didn’t. She looked at Charles at last, taking him in—her eyes landed on the suppression bracelet and flashed with interest—which was a nice change, most people didn’t look past his wheelchair. “Emma Frost,” she said. “Erik used to go to school with us.”

Charles immediately wanted to ask a barrage of questions, starting from _What was he like as a freshman_ and ending with _Why the hell is he acting this way now,_ but one glance at Erik’s cold, closed-off expression and he refrained. “It’s lovely to meet you,” he said instead, society manners turning him even posher than normal. “Charles Xavier.”

“I’d shake your hand, but,” Azazel said, nodding at the evidence tub he was holding. Emma, whose hands were free, didn’t offer. Her eyes drifted away from Charles’s chair and settled on Erik, who had gone the stony-silent not of the angry but of the petrified, in the literal sense of the word.

“So what have you been up to, Erik?” she said. There was something familiar about her tone, something that reminded Charles of the way women used to address his mother at the soirees their social circles had thrown back in Westchester. Polite and cutting disdain, bordering on disgust. He wanted to wheel in front of Erik and take the brunt of that coldness, of that biting winter chill, but Erik hadn’t moved, and Charles was awkwardly trapped between him and the lockers. “The team’s been _so_ different this year.” Erik was stiff as a board. His knuckles, on the dolly handle, were bleached white. “Which you’d know, if you hadn’t… hmm. Run away.”

“I didn’t run away,” Erik said hollowly. Charles glanced up at him, concerned.

Emma sniffed with amusement; Azazel grinned. “Oh, we’re all friends here, Erik,” he said. “No need for that.”

“Are we all friends?” Emma said, her eyes wide and guileless. “Have you told your new partner here what he can expect from you, Erik?” 

“Don’t,” Erik said softly.

“What do you mean?” Charles said defensively, aware he was falling into a trap, but too close to it to see where the tripwires were.

“I mean,” Emma said, “the way he ruins everything he _touches._ ” She put extra emphasis on that last word. Charles had a dizzying, horrible moment of picturing Emma and Erik together, a glamorous, diamond-cut couple. “It was in the news. Don’t you get the news in—where do you live now, Erik? Frisco?” _The news?_

“Shut up, Emma,” Erik said. Oh, he was _angry_ now. Charles thought he had seen Erik angry before, but this was something different, something that shattered and simmered in its intensity.

“Don’t talk to her that way,” Azazel said, low and smiling.

“Tell me,” Emma said, with the cruel air of someone about to strike a finishing blow, “has he slept with your coach yet, or is he saving that for the most inopportune moment possible?”

Erik dropped the dolly.

Before Charles could grab at him, he had crossed the hallway and Azazel was stepping out in front of Emma and Erik was—good god—throwing a punch—in a second, Azazel had him in a headlock, but Erik thrust his elbow into Azazel’s sternum and he let go, gasping—Emma took two quick steps backward, smiling, enthralled at the spectacle going on before her—and Charles, who hadn’t let himself process Emma’s last words, cried out, “Erik!” and reached for him, but Erik shoved him backwards until he rolled into the tubs and went after Azazel again. Azazel used his tail to trip up Erik, but Erik turned his fall into a controlled lunge and slammed Azazel into the ground hard enough that his head cracked on the linoleum; dazed, Azazel lifted a hand to his head—Erik wound up for another punch—

“Erik!” Charles shouted.

“What the _hell_ is going on here,” said the man who must have been their judge, flanked by—oh god—Logan and an adult wearing one of the tournament t-shirts, an organizer. Logan stormed forward and pried Erik off the ground before he could hit Azazel again, dragging him backward by his crooked tie.

“Fuck,” he snapped, and shoved Erik backwards; the organizer was holding Azazel back similarly, and he was shouting, something about both of them being disqualified.

“Erik started it,” Emma said, soft and sweet and utterly guileless.

The organizer turned on Erik; a bruise was already blooming on his temple where Azazel had struck him. He hunched, defeated and sullen, into a wall, like if he pressed against it hard enough he could melt into it—but it was plaster, not metal, so he couldn’t. “I’ll have you both disqualified from the circuit for the rest of the year,” the organizer snapped, but he was only looking at Erik. Charles glanced at Erik; his expression hadn’t changed at all.

“Before we do anything too hasty,” Logan said, “let’s talk.”

— ⓧ —

It was Logan who saved them in the end. Logan, who was a coach as lax as Charles’s last coach had been intense—Logan, who preferred to sit around the judges’ lounge sipping spiked coke instead of sitting with the students in the cafeteria doing anything that actually resembled coaching. Charles didn’t see Logan go to bat for them as much as he _heard_ him shouting down a tournament organizer as Charles and Erik sat outside a spare classroom as their fates were decided. Charles tried speaking to Erik, took various tacks toward him—sympathy, curiosity, fury—but none of them moved him. He stared at his hands blankly, too—what? depressed? exhausted?—to even spin his pen around his fingers like he did when he was thinking.

“Erik,” Charles said, having been reduced to plaintive pleading. “Erik.”

Erik didn’t say anything. Fair enough. They were all but alone in the hallway—Emma and Azazel were waiting for their own punishments in a separate hallway with their coach speaking to a different tournament organizer—but a university in broad daylight while a raucous debate over their future was going on behind them was perhaps not the best time to ask about _Has he slept with your coach yet_ , and all the potential horror a question like that entailed.

Logan finally stepped out of the room in which their fates were being decided, clapping a tournament organizer who seemed substantially less like he was going to wring Erik’s neck on the shoulder. As the organizer flapped off to finish another one of the never-ending tasks that popped up when you had a speech tournament and several hundred high schoolers milling around the grounds, Logan loomed over Charles and Erik, who still hadn’t looked up, and pronounced, “Y’all aren’t disqualified from the circuit. From the tournament, yes, but I managed to talk Zeng into letting _me_ handle what we tell the organizers of the rest of the tournaments on the circuit, and I’m backing you two up. That having been said, Erik, you’re on probation for the rest of the month, and that’s my decision, not anyone else’s. Our tournament’s coming up at the end of the month; you can spend the time calling up restaurants asking for donations. Don’t argue with me,” Logan said forbiddingly, though Erik was still so—dejected? worn out?—that it didn’t look like he even had the energy to argue, which was his favorite activity in the entire world. Charles realized after a moment that Logan was looking at _him,_ and he had indeed opened his mouth to defend Erik. “That’s final. Fistfights in a school hallway, my god. Y’all are supposed to represent the school and all that bullshit. That’s why you’re wearing the fucking suits.”

Logan, still grumbling, turned and started down the hallway—back to the judge’s lounge and his spiked coke, probably. Charles bit his lip. It had turned out as well as he could’ve expected, anyway. “It could be worse,” he told Erik consolingly, as though maybe more words could penetrate the armor that had coalesced around him like stormclouds, like thunder. “It could be _so_ much worse, Erik.”

Erik swallowed. With difficulty, slowly, as though he were speaking through molasses, he said, his voice terrible and cold, “At least you know I’m not fucking Logan. If I were, he probably would let us keep competing,” and then he was standing and striding away, not running, but only because he had too much dignity, even wounded, for that.

“Erik!” Charles called after him, hands on the wheels of his chair, but Erik had turned sharply down a hallway and was taking the stairs up two at a time, though they were already on the top floor, to the clock tower protruding from the building’s roof. _Talk to me,_ Charles thought, anguished, although with his telepathy bound he couldn’t make Erik hear him any more than he could make Erik obey. Not that he would. Not that he ever would, especially not now that Emma fucking Frost had… implied what she’d implied, about Erik and his former coach and consent and the loss of control and autonomy. He wondered if it was his own curiosity that was prodding at him for answers or the strange burning pit in his chest that hungered for Erik and had since the moment he’d seen him spreading in the debate room. He wondered if asking would make him another selfish bastard who had taken advantage of Erik or a friend who needed to know so that he could comfort, tiptoe, confront.

In the end, he suspected that he just needed to know for the same reason that Erik spent long afternoons and evenings researching the most minute details about the US Federal Government’s policy towards mutants. Because knowledge was power, and right now, he disliked the feeling that Emma and Azazel had power over Erik, and, in extension, over Charles.

Charles sighed and wheeled to the elevator. He would see if there was roof access and if there wasn’t, head back down to the cafeteria to support the others. Just because he was disqualified from the tournament didn’t mean he didn’t have to stay.

The news spread quickly—by the next round the entire team had heard that Erik had punched someone, which was why Charles and Erik weren’t competing at UT, of all places—and every time Raven was back from her own competitions, she gave him liquid-eyed stares of support, which were… appreciated, if a little annoying. Charles kept an eye out for Erik, but he didn’t come down from whichever alcove he’d hidden himself in even from his debate partner. Charles thought sadly about the afternoons they’d spent crammed into quiet corners of deserted schools together, and longing lanced through him. He beat it down; Erik didn’t need someone crushing on him right now, he needed a confidante. A friend.

He did catch sight of Azazel and Emma, sitting at their own table—of Erik’s former schoolmates, he realized—surrounded by a fairly large team of what looked like debaters and speech geeks, only a few of them interpers like Raven. They were laughing about something. Emma had a cruel glint in her eyes that made Charles have absolutely no doubt who they were laughing about, even though Azazel was already beginning to bruise from his fight with Erik. Charles gritted his teeth and absolutely did not wheel over there to confront them, to try and prise more details about Erik and… whoever his coach had been… out of a source so biased and so— _heartless,_ to be able to hurt Erik like that and then laugh about it. All he would get, he suspected, was lies—lies that were the last thing Erik would have wanted or needed him to believe.

Erik finally appeared, slinking like a shadow, when it was time for them to start heading home; neither Hank or Raven, and certainly none of the freshmen, had made it to finals in their chosen events, not at a tournament as cutthroat as UT. In fact, even though Charles had been looking out for him, his eyes almost skipped over him, he was so good at appearing invisible when he wanted to be. “Erik!” he called out, but Erik ignored him and crammed himself into the back corner of the bus, far away from the wheelchair lift area that Charles was confined to. On the entire four-hour-long ride home, Charles watched him, watched the lights pass over his face as he stared out the window, watched the tense line of his shoulders and the way he was resolutely turned away from everyone but especially Charles, and thought— _I can’t ask. I won’t ask._

— ⓧ —

Erik was avoiding him. He might know where Charles lived, but Charles had no such information on Erik. New files showed up in their evidence tub like clockwork, updating the NAFTA disad with the latest evidence claiming that the treaty would never pass Congress or the treaty passing Congress was inevitable, things like that, but Charles never _saw_ him; Charles hung out in the debate room near-obsessively keeping a watch for Erik to drop by and refresh the evidence tubs, but it genuinely seemed like Erik had enlisted the help of elves or gremlins or something to sneak the files past Charles when he had to blink. Erik was never so undignified as to turn and walk the other way when he saw Charles coming; instead, Charles had to wonder whether he’d transferred schools, whether they still attended the same classes at all, he saw Erik so rarely and only when they were parted by a sea of moving bodies in between class times.

Charles could still attend tournaments, maybe do some extemp, but the truth was there just weren’t that many tournaments to attend in February, and it was easier for him to say no and get some work done preparing for their own tournament. (Logan, whose job it was to run the tournament, had taken delegation to an art form, so Charles’s job was to call local restaurants and ask for food donations that they could then either feed to the judges, complimentary, or sell to desperate starving students as a fundraiser.) And, while he was working, torment himself about what Emma had said and obsess over whether or not he was really going to go through with what he had planned.

There was another way for him to figure it out besides asking Erik. _It was in the news,_ Emma had said. 

Erik hadn’t been at the library for weeks either.

Charles wheeled inside, breathing in the scent of books but old, the oil of hands turning many pages instead of the crisp, new scent of combined bookstore-coffee shops. He hesitated, torn between the huge, silver wall of the card catalog and the reference desk, but ultimately touched his wrist, where a power-dampening bracelet did _not_ sit, and figured he’d be able to make anyone forget about his asking as he turned to the reference desk.

“Can I help you, dear?” asked a fairly youngish woman who seemed to have wholeheartedly embraced the librarian stereotype, from the pince-nez glasses to the endearments.

Charles gave her his most charming smile. “I’m looking for a news article from Midland, Texas,” he said. “Fairly obscure, I’m afraid. Something from last year, about a speech team and a scandal?”

It took the librarian six minutes to find it.

From the _Midland Reporter:_

TEACHER FIRED AFTER MOLESTING DEBATE STUDENT

It didn’t have Erik’s name, but. But phrases like _prize student_ and _spent more time with him than any other_ —it wouldn’t have been that hard to figure out, right? Charles read the whole thing with bile bubbling deep in his throat. It was all very journalistic. _Name withheld for privacy concerns_. But the student in question had moved four hours away to escape the rumors. _Highly successful speech and debate coach._ So much so that his students might resent a whistle-blower, especially if, as the article seemed to imply, he was the only one being hurt?

 _Sebastian Shaw._ The name of the man who had hurt Erik was Sebastian Shaw.

— ⓧ —

Erik turned up again for the tournament they were holding itself, though he still managed to avoid Charles, and Charles let him. It felt wrong, to press Erik for his company, when… when he knew, when his vague suspicions had taken form and settled heavily on his shoulders like birds of prey pecking at his entrails. The weekend of the tournament dawned and Erik paced outside the library, running tab almost single-handedly, making sure the ballots got counted up properly and the correct people made it to semifinals and finals for every single event in the tournament. Raven was running food services in the cafeteria; Hank was running extemp; the freshmen were running between tab and the cafeteria to make sure postings got put up correctly. Charles took care of everything else: judge hospitality, making sure the classrooms were unlocked, keeping Logan updated whenever he decided that he wanted to vaguely appear like he was doing something instead of leaving it all to the kids.

A judge, a pair of LD’ers trotting behind, came up to him. Their basement classroom they’d been assigned to was locked. And only Erik had the elevator keys. Charles took a deep breath and wheeled up to tab. “You need to come,” he said, figuring Erik would appreciate the briskness of his tone, the lack of nonsense in it.

“Why?” Erik asked suspiciously. “No, for god’s sake, you check the ballots to make sure they’re signed before you bring them in,” he swore at Scott, the hapless freshman who was “helping” him with Tab. “Can it wait?”

“It can’t,” Charles said. “Unless you want to give me the elevator keys.”

Erik looked like he was seriously considering it, but the elevator keys—the sole set belonging to the school—were worth more than Erik’s life, Logan had impressed on him, to lose. He grunted with disapproval and stood to follow Charles down the classrooms where the judge and debaters were waiting. They stood waiting for the elevator to arrive, Charles staring fixedly ahead, Erik shifting from foot to foot, rolling the keys over his knuckles the way he would a pen.

 _I hate this,_ Charles thought miserably. Somehow, in the last few months, prickly, asshole Erik Lehnsherr had become his closest friend in Texas, entirely independently of how badly Charles wanted to see him kiss-mussed and pupils-blown. This distance between them—would it continue for the rest of the year? Maybe Erik could cut himself off so easily, but for Charles, detaching from a mind he’d been that closed to felt rather like lopping off a limb, like losing part of himself, and he had some experience with that.

So when the elevator arrived, Charles rolled into it and blurted out, in spite of all his efforts to the contrary, “Are you going to run away from me, too, the way you did with your old school?”

Erik dropped the keys.

He’d stepped halfway into the elevator so, in a fluke twist of fate, the keys plummeted out of the air and into the seam between elevator and floor. Erik grabbed for them futilely, completely forgetting that if he wanted to, he could freeze the keys in midair. He swore. Charles swore. “Hold the door,” he snapped, his face flaming red, as he knelt by the crack and tried to summon up the keys from the elevator shaft.

Charles leaned on the “door open” button with his elbow and said, “How did you manage that?!”

“Shut up, I’m concentrating.”

Erik was kneeling, scowling at the floor of the elevator, his hand faintly trembling with the effort to shimmy the key up the shaft and into his hand. After a full minute of this, Charles, whose elbow was getting tired, asked, “What’s the hold-up?”

“The damn keys won’t fit through the crack.”

“They got down there, they have to be able to get back up!” Charles said, well and truly panicking now. Oh, god, if they had to go to Logan about this they were dead. Logan was even more committed to kicking back and relaxing during this tournament than usual.

“Don’t you think I know that?” Erik snapped. “Shit.” He sat back on his heels, rubbing his eyes. “Fuck. We’re going to have to go down to the basement and see if we can get to the elevator shaft that way.”

“How are we going to do that,” Charles said, “ _without the elevator keys?”_

“Shit,” Erik snarled, and for the first time all day, he looked at a total loss for what to do next. Competent debate-tournament-running Erik had faded into teenage-boy Erik, and Charles felt his heart throb painfully in his chest. Fuck.

Why had he had to open his big fat mouth and say something? Why couldn’t he just let Erik drift away in peace and only see him when it came to practices and tournaments? “Sorry,” Charles blurted again.

Erik stiffened. “I suppose I knew better than to hope that you wouldn’t have figured it out,” he said coldly. “I’d understand if you—didn’t want to be my partner anymore—”

“What? Why?!” Charles cried out, plaintive, confused.

“It’s—” Erik wiped his hands on his pants. He looked tired. “It’s a lot to ask, isn’t it? Trusting someone when you know their darkest secret?” He made a noise that was like a laugh, but much bitterer. “That’s what everyone at Midland told me, anyway. Of course, they also had… other opinions on. On what I did with Sebastian.”

Hearing the name sent a shiver down Charles’s spine. “It wasn’t your fault,” he said sharply.

“Yeah,” Erik said, “my mother keeps telling me that.”

Charles wheeled closer. The elevator doors tried to close on Erik; he hit the “door open” button with a vengeance and said, “She’s right. Erik—how could I think any less of you? How could I possibly understand what it was like, to have that happen to you? You’re still—you’re still—” Erik closed his eyes, as though he were bracing himself for what Charles would say next— “my friend. My. My closest friend here. And I think… I’m yours.”

“You are,” Erik admitted softly, his eyes still closed.

“Friends,” Charles repeated. “And friends don’t judge, all right? You can tell me—as much or as little as you want—you can tell me to never speak about it again—you can tell me to, to fight Emma Frost the next time I see her, and I will—”

Erik curled up on the floor and splayed his fingers over his face, but he was hiding a crooked smile. “She’d beat you to death with her heels.”

“A worthy end in defense of a friend,” Charles said unconvincingly.

Erik chuckled. He peeked out from behind his fingers. “So—we’re friends again then,” he said, sounding a little breathless.

“Yeah,” Charles said, “of course we are.” And he caught Erik’s eyes and was briefly swept away in the storm of them, and when Erik looked away, blinking dazedly, he thought that maybe Erik had felt the same. Charles put aside all childish notions of kissing and groping; Erik had been through a trauma, maybe he would never want that again—and resigned himself to long nights at the library arguing over the best strategy to take down an “local government does plan instead” counterplan. Surprisingly, it didn’t feel like resigning himself at all. It felt like the fresh new bud of the future, something to look forward to and appreciate in his own right: Charles and Erik as friends.

He thought, rather, that Erik might be the best friend he’d _ever_ had, and wondered what that said about all his past friendships.

“You know,” Charles said after a moment, “you could always take the stairs,” and Erik laughed, loud, as though he was surprised by himself, and without another word turned and jogged away to the stairwell to see whether he could make it into the basement himself.

— ⓧ —

Eventually, they rescued the elevator key—not until long after the judge got impatient and just held the round out in the hallway, though. Logan growled at them, but given the way they were holding the precious set of keys out to him, he couldn’t get _too_ angry. Charles and Erik exchanged looks, and Erik shot him a smile less rakish than shy, and Charles grinned back, and he thought that they would be okay. They would be just fine.

— ⓧ —

He’d slept on the library tables on the Friday evening between the first and second day of their tournaments because it was easier than going home. When he finally made it home after the end of the tournament, long past midnight since they’d had to clean everything up themselves, his mother was waiting in the kitchen, a bare dim bulb they’d misplaced the lampshade for in the move lighting up the living room and the corners of the dining nook. “Where were you?” she said. She was smoking. She ground out a cigarette and lit another one.

“Debate tournament,” he said. She hmmed. He didn’t think she believed him, and indeed he usually got in a few hours earlier for most tournaments, but it was too much effort and energy to explain that he’d been hosting the tournament. She took a long drag on her cigarette.

“Don’t stay up too late,” she said mechanically, like someone had told her it was the sort of thing mothers said once, and he nodded and took the lift to his attic bedroom. He tried not to catalog too carefully her smeared lipstick, or the way in which if she was awake at this hour, it was because she’d been out nearly as long as he had. He tried not to think about the way debate tournaments kept him out later than his alcoholic partier of a mother, and what that said about his social life. Instead, as he crawled into bed, he thought about Erik, and the way they had sat, side-by-side, Erik’s shoulder pressing against his own, as they watched the freshmen scramble to put the library back in order, taking a much-deserved rest after running the tournament more or less single-handedly. He thought about the warmth of Erik’s body beside his own and the fond smirk he wore, straightening and lengthening into a fonder smile when he caught Charles’s gaze out of the corner of his eye. He sighed and drifted to sleep calling to mind Erik’s scent. 

— ⓧ —

Erik threw himself back into practicing with a vigor that simultaneously alarmed and aroused Charles, and he understood better now why Erik spoke with a sort of manic gleam about winning State, as though it would absolve him of all the debate-related crimes his former classmates had heaped upon him for getting Sebastian Shaw fired. Why he spoke about beating Midland with a particular kind of relish, though he warned Charles that it would be hard, that he’d been their prize debater but Emma and Azazel were no slouches, that they had the entire weight of a well-trained team to do their research while Charles and Erik had just themselves.

But they worked together better now, and Charles understood better how to pull Erik back from the terrible edge of near-violence he sometimes stumbled upon when he was turning a particularly shoddy argument. They made it to finals increasingly often. In February they won their first tournament; not one that Midland had competed in, it was a bit too far away from that, but it got them valuable qualifying points to State.

As they were waiting for that particular finals round to begin, Erik slouched against a bank of lockers, Charles flicking through their evidence tubs, Charles had asked, “Why _do_ you get so angry at kritiks?”

“Shaw preferred them,” Erik had said quietly. It was one of the rare times he actually spoke about the man that had hurt him, so Charles shut up and listened attentively, surprised that he got this much engagement from simply making conversation to draw Erik out of the shell he retreated into when he was nervous. “I never understood it. Policy debate is a fundamentally utilitarian exercise. Even kritiks—’prefer our interpretation because feminism’—have to link to a thermonuclear war impact for them to be taken seriously. What’s the point in pretending that we care about ethics or morality? Stick to the facts.”

“Ethics and morality _are_ facts,” Charles said. “They have real consequences. Sure, kritiks go about proving that in a… convoluted way—” he was familiar with the kritik Erik was complaining about; a pair of sophomores had tried to run a gendered language kritik against them, arguing that the use of female-exclusionary language in Charles and Erik’s evidence led to misogynistic violence led to destabilized societies led to thermonuclear war—most arguments in CX debate linked to thermonuclear war, and often a debate came down to arguing which was _most_ likely to cause thermonuclear war in the shortest time frame— “but it’s never worth it to just ignore them entirely.”

Erik snorted. “I’ll use a kritik if it’s called for,” he grumbled.

“People can tell you don’t believe what you’re saying,” Charles pointed out. “It makes you less credible.”

“It’s policy debate, it’s not about being _credible,_ it’s about having the better evidence and the quicker mind,” Erik said dismissively.

“Still. If we want to win State we need better speaker points,” Charles said, “and you rolling your eyes at your own arguments is not exactly going to help us on that front.” He remembered something Erik had told him once, about the vague concept of life outside debate. “I bet you didn’t roll your eyes when you talked about morality in your poetry.”

“That’s different,” Erik protested.

“Is not,” Charles said smugly. “I’m going to convince you that policy debate and poetry are two sides of the same coin if it’s the last thing I do, probably because you are going to strangle me afterward.”

And then their opponents, a pair of sleek juniors from another private school, walked up to them and introduced themselves, and the challenge between them was lost. Charles didn’t forget it, though. He was enchanted all over again with the idea of Erik penning verses on his legal pad between rounds, and suspected that the cessation of poetry rather had something to do with Sebastian Shaw and the move several hours away from Midland to Richardson. And he wasn’t going to stand for that. Erik was someone who deserved poetry. Deserved lightness and beauty, not just evidence and bureaucracy. Charles would bring it into his life by force, if necessary. Charles was used to foisting good things onto people against their will.

— ⓧ —

It had been going to happen inevitably. “My cousins are going to be over for Pesach next week,” Erik says, making a face. “My mother’s putting a moratorium on all debate-related activities while they’re here. Can we try to catch up on Thursday?”

“I can’t do Thursdays,” Charles reminded him. Unlike the first time he’d told Erik this, when he’d been greeted with an incurious acceptance, Erik looked at him now with vague surprise, like he’d totally forgotten that the reason they never did any practice on Thursdays was more than Charles’s insistence that they each spend just a little bit of their time doing something other than debate.

“What happens on Thursdays?” Erik asked.

Charles shrugged self-consciously. “Just a thing I have to do for my mother,” he muttered. “I’ll see you the week after, then?”

Erik looked torn—they were winning regularly now, but if anything that had only redoubled his commitment to regular, grueling mock debates and research times—but nodded. Maybe if Charles hadn’t been so eager to leave that conversation behind and move onto other things, like the best way to counter a popular “draft mutants into the military” aff besides their standard “the military is not the US federal government” topicality argument, he would’ve noticed the way Erik’s pale eyes followed him, the social instinct that had lain long-dormant in his heart perking up at last now that he had someone to care about besides his mother.

But maybe he would have written that off, too; it was easy to fall into the expected roles: Erik, who cared for nothing except the thrill of victory, and Charles, who was constantly trying to get him to hone his more humane instincts. It was harder to admit that perhaps he was the one who needed a touch of human feeling, needed someone to see through the cracks in the soul-armor he wore when driving his mother to her therapy appointment every Thursdays.

— ⓧ —

Though they had different lunch periods, Erik made a point of walking out of the cafeteria just as Charles was filing in, during that week when they didn’t see each other after school at all. Charles appreciated it; it was strange, going a whole day without seeing Erik’s face, it reminded him of the bad days in January when Erik had been avoiding him and he’d felt the cold front of loneliness rush down on him in spite of Raven’s (and by extension Hank’s) best efforts.

He held onto that feeling of warmth as Erik smirked down at him as they brushed past each other in the hallways as his mother pecked at his clothing as he drove her to the psychiatrist’s office. He held onto that feeling of being _seen_ as he sat in the car and slowly paged through his calculus notebook for the test on Monday. He held onto that feeling of gratitude and warmth as he turned into the driveway and saw Erik leaning against the cast-iron fence of the old Victorian house, his bike abandoned on the grassy lawn, and briefly wanted to tear his hair out.

“Who is that?” his mother asked. “Do you know him?”

 _A friend of yours?_ a normal mother might have asked, but Charles honestly wasn’t sure whether or not his mother believed in friendship, or if her relationship to it was as agnostic as her one to God. “That’s Erik,” Charles said, trying to remain cheerful. “My debate partner.”

His mother hmmmed skeptically and let herself out of the car. She drifted past Erik without asking for introduction or explanation; Erik ignored her in turn, only perking up when Charles, not quite in a fury yet but getting there, tossed his wheelchair out of the front seat and climbed out after it. “I was wondering how much longer I’d have to wait for you,” Erik said, completely ignoring the way Charles was running his hands through his hair, agitated. He hadn’t wanted Erik and his mother to ever meet, he realized now. He didn’t want the knowledge of _what she was_ to _taint_ his interactions with Erik, with the rest of the team, the way they had in Westchester, when everyone had known what Sharon Marko’s problem had been.

“I _told_ you I can’t practice on Thursdays,” Charles said plaintively.

“I’m not here for practice,” Erik said. “I just thought you might need… a friend.”

“I—” Charles swallowed. Fought back bile. “What do you know? How did you—?”

“I don’t know anything,” Erik said, surprisingly gently. “I just saw the look on your face when you told me you were busy, and I figured you might want some company. Was I wrong?”

The anger drained out of Charles abruptly, though he grabbed at it, trying to sustain it; but the thing about his mother’s condition was that it sapped most of the emotional energy from him, and after a therapy appointment, which he had to drive her to if he wanted to make sure that she attended them, even if she wasn’t sober that day, that week, that month, he had even less space in his chest to rage than normal. “Not wrong,” Charles said. “Overstepping, maybe.”

“I can live with that,” Erik said. “Listen, we have a ton of leftover food. Do you want to go to mine and… not practice?” he said dubiously, as though he wasn’t sure what people who didn’t spend every free moment of their lives debating did with themselves.

The wind was high. Erik impatiently shoved his hair out of his face, but the wind whipped color into his cheekbones—the winter had been mild for Charles, it hadn’t even snowed once, but the winds and the storms had startled him, and the rapidly darkening sky above suggested that it wouldn’t do to stay outside for much longer. Charles thought about inviting Erik inside while his mother was there and awake too and felt vaguely sick. “Okay,” he said, and Erik smiled, and that almost made it worth it.

— ⓧ —

Edie Lehnsherr was a round-shouldered, tired-looking woman who had Erik’s pale eyes, but she smiled much more than Erik did. She put a plate of profiteroles in front of them, ice cream-filled pastries that had been made with matzoh meal instead of flour, she explained, and watched fondly as Charles shoved two in his mouth at once. Edie and Erik argued in the rapid-fire patter of another language as Charles stared out the window and licked ice cream off of his lips. Erik, for the first time engaged and bright about something other than crushing an opponent into fine paste, showed him around their refrigerator and explained different parts of the Passover meal by their leftovers. Edie listened to a radio drama and hummed as she cleaned the stove.

Outside, it began to storm. Edie pursed her lips as the radio began to report a tornado warning. “You can’t drive back in this,” she told him, her words angled with the same accent as Erik’s gentle lilt, only stronger. “You must stay tonight.”

“Oh, I couldn’t possibly impose—”

A harsh crack of lightning came jostling down from the heavens close enough to make them all jump with the noise and the lights flicker. “I could ride along with him,” Erik offered. “Lightning is just magnetic potential energy—”

“Ack, and a tornado? Is that _magnetic potential energy,_ too?” Edie said sharply. Erik shut his mouth. It was the first time Charles had seen anyone shut him up with two sentences, and his respect for Erik’s mother began to multiply in his mind. “We have lived in this area for twelve years,” she told Charles, a hint of reproof still in her eyes as Erik, red-faced, chewed mutinously on a profiterole. “Every time I have to tell him that he is not stronger than all of Nature. I still don’t think he believes me.”

Charles wondered, a bit of guilt in the back of his mind as he did, how Edie had responded to the news of what Sebastian Shaw had done to her son. If there had been fights about Erik’s determination to carry on debating, if she had questioned tearfully what he felt like he had to prove to the world. If moving had been her idea or his; and no sooner had he thought the question than he’d realized that it had been hers, and she hadn’t given him a choice, because Erik would’ve rubbed himself raw against the social scrutiny, Erik would have rather killed himself by inches than run away, or else Charles’s impulsive _Are you going to run away from me too_ wouldn’t have hit nearly as hard.

He looked at Edie cupping Erik’s face fondly in her hand as he tried to duck away from her touch and her laugh and the way she swatted at him when he tried to steal a ladleful of soup and felt a terrible pang in the vicinity of his chest where his own mother lived, but a healing pain, a good pain. A pain that chased away the distance and the cold of his own house, a pain that welcomed him into the world of happy families, which, whatever Dostoevsky said, were not all the same. “I can’t stay,” he said, but what he meant was, _please ask me again._

And Erik, with his preternatural sense of what his opponents were thinking that not even a power-suppressed telepath could match, said, “Come on, Charles. Just for tonight. I promise I won’t ever kidnap you again without checking the weather.”

Erik wasn’t looking at him; he was eyeing the soup on the stove with something like avarice, which was the only reason Charles had it in himself to lick his lips and say, “Okay.”

— ⓧ —

“Is it okay, to sleep on the couch with your legs?” Edie asked that evening after dinner, a concerned crease in her brow.

“Charles can sleep with me, Ma,” Erik said. “I have room.”

Charles very carefully thought of nothing, and said nothing, and protested nothing. So when Erik found him an extra pair of pajamas and turned away while he changed, talking all the while about his most annoying cousin and not mentioning at all the length of time it took Charles to get undressed and then redressed, and when Charles crawled into Erik’s full-size bed and pulled the covers up to his waist, and when Erik, still complaining, climbed into bed next to him, Charles was fully prepared to think only platonic thoughts for the rest of the evening.

They argued over Erik’s bedtime reading, which turned out to be more blocks. Charles pointed out several slim volumes of poetry that were mostly concealed by a stack of legal pads and an explosion of evidence that had consumed his desk and was now colonizing his bookshelf. Erik said brusquely that he hadn’t read any poetry in a long time. Charles pouted about bedtime stories and Erik, exasperated, yanked out one called _My Alexandria_ and read aloud a pulsing, undulent poem about language and jellyfish where the jellyfish were obviously a metaphor for mutants, and before he knew it Charles wasn’t teasing, just enthralled, captivated, with the rise of fall of language issuing from Erik’s lips, and Erik’s reading wasn’t aggravated, just tenderly woven through the delicate strands of words on the page, and it felt rather like being in the middle of the spread, when language became music, when words escaped their meanings and became pure sound.

 _We look at alien grace,_ Erik read,

_unfettered_  
_by any determined form,_  
_and we say: balloon, flower,_

_heart, condom, opera,_  
_lampshade, parasol, ballet._  
_Hear how the mouth,_

_so full_  
_of longing for the world,_  
_changes its shape?_

When he finished, the only sound for a long moment was the distant mumble of thunder on the horizon. “Wow,” Charles said after a moment.

Erik cleared his throat. “Mark Doty is a mutant,” he said. “There was a big controversy a while ago, when a competitor accused him of using his empathic abilities on the awards committee. Great poets, though, they make you feel what they feel with their words alone.”

“Are all the poets on your shelves mutants?” Charles asked, his eyes skimming over the short stack he could see through the dim light of the bedroom lamp: Anzaldúa, Lorde, Davis.

“Not all,” Erik said. “Most.” He set the book he’d been reading from on top of one called _Borderlands/La Frontera_ and said, “Mutants understand the liminal spaces between things better than most. That’s where poetry is, in the gap between what is and what is supposed to be. Go to sleep.”

Charles lay obediently down as Erik turned off the bedside lamp. Outside wind rustled the trees stationed near the Lehnsherrs’ small house; rain plonked against the roof like plucked harp strings. Every now and then, a siren would start up in the distance as tornado warnings came into effect and faded out, an almost soothing white noise to his idiot hindbrain, as soothing as Erik’s steady breath next to him and the warm heat he radiated—something, Charles thought, to do with his metabolism and his metallokinesis. He always ran hot. Erik turned to face him in the darkness. Through the light let in through the blinds, Charles could see his pale eyes open and considering Charles, as though he were about to ask, now that all the lights were off and they could’ve been the only two people for miles around, them and the thunder.

He thought about secrets, and trust, and realized dully that Erik hadn’t been given the choice to trust him with his own secret, and it was only fair if Charles told him—

“It’s not about fair,” Erik said softly. “You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want.”

Charles started. “How—?”

“You were thinking _very_ loudly,” Erik said, a faint smile curling his lips. “And for a telepath, that’s saying something.”

Charles tapped his fingers on the edge of the quilt. Lightning illuminated the cut of Erik’s cheekbone, a slice of his face lit up by one of the few natural phenomenon that produced light that originated on earth, not in the stars. “You don’t want to know? You want to know everything, Erik Lehnsherr. You want to eat the world whole and win every argument.”

“I want to know,” Erik said. “If you don’t tell me I’ll just make up something outlandish and awful. But it’s not about _fair,_ Charles. You don’t owe me just because you know—what happened to me. Real life isn’t a debate. There’s no quid pro quo about sharing your feelings, the way there is for swapping evidence.” _Real life isn’t a debate,_ Charles mouthed to himself. His skepticism must have been clear, because Erik chuckled. “Pretend you’re talking to Erik the Poet now. Gaps in knowledge are an important part of poetry, you know. The spaces between words. The breaks between lines.”

“Hello, Erik the Poet,” Charles said quietly. “I didn’t know you were real.”

“I’m not, usually,” Erik breathed. His breath fluttered hotly against Charles’s cheek. Charles closed his eyes and breathed. “You have five minutes before I turn back into Erik the Debater. Like Cinderella’s pumpkin.”

“My mother’s sober again but I don’t know how long it’s going to last this time,” Charles blurted out, and the twin waves of shame and relief that swept over him when it was finally hanging out in the air between them steamrolled over him and left him exhausted and limp. “And I don’t know what I’m going to do when I leave for college. Who’s going to drive her to her appointments? Who’s going to pour all the bottles out into the sink when she inevitably falls off the wagon again?” To his horror, tears pricked at his eyes. “And I guess—I guess I’m just getting used to the fact that soon my childhood will be over, and my mom won’t have been sober for more than six months of it at a time. I always thought it would get better, you know. That one day, she’d clean up her act for _good_ and everything would be… the way it is in storybooks. And now I’m trying to accept that it won’t work like that. That I’ll go my whole life without knowing what it’s like to… to have a mother like yours. Because you can’t turn your parents in for a refund. You can ditch your friends, you can get new partners, you can pick up and move across the country if you need to. But no one except, like, foster kids ever gets a second chance at parents.”

Erik didn’t say anything for a long time. The rain came down harder. Charles turned anxiously to Erik, wondering if he would think this was rich-kid whining, the sort of problems that paled in comparison to real hardship. “Erik?”

“That’s not fair,” Erik said softly. “I know I said it’s not about fairness. But it’s still… not fair.”

Charles closed his eyes and battled away the hot sting in his eyes. “Yeah, I guess not.”

“That’s why I like debate,” Erik said. “It’s all about…”

“Fairness and education,” Charles said with a faint smile. The standard voters that debaters who were running topicality arguments urged the judges to consider. Charles had said it so many times himself that the phrase tumbled off his tongue without spaces between the words, a little fragment of the spread in this everyday conversation.

“Yeah,” Erik said. And then, like it was any debate topic in the world, “’Resolved: Our pasts do not define us.’”

Charles chuckled. “Plan: We win State, leave this place, and don’t look back.”

“We?”

“We,” Charles said, “you and me,” and in the dark Erik’s eyes were luminous, in the dark Erik’s eyes were bottomless.

— ⓧ —

They qualified for State without even really seeming to notice it. It wasn’t a definite line, where one moment they were concerned they weren’t going to make it, and one moment they were winning tournaments and earning six qual points apiece. The victories just started piling up. Mostly small area schools; they would have a tougher fight when they were actually at State, with its gauntlet of debaters as well-trained and well-prepared as they were. But Charles wasn’t that worried. He thought he could see it coming together with the air of fate, their path laid out in front of them, obstacles falling before them like so many dominoes. As the air cleared and the mild winter faded to a scorching spring, as the last tournament of the year drew nearer and nearer, as he and Erik drew closer with the punishing force of destiny on their side, the world seemed lit up for them to take, if they could only reach far enough.

“I need to talk to y’all about travel,” Logan said one afternoon, catching Erik and Charles as they were heading out of the debate room to practice, evidence tubs in tow. “State’s in El Paso this year. Can’t justify paying out for a bus, not with just the two of you going, but I can get you a hotel if you can cover the travel yourselves.”

Charles shrugged, but Erik bit his lip, obviously doing cost-calculations in the back of his head over how much a bus ride from Richardson to the other side of the state would be. Charles rescued him. “Why don’t we make a road trip of it?” he asked when Logan had left, already seeing it unfurl in his mind’s eye; Charles behind the wheel, Erik in the passenger’s seat quizzing him briskly on strategy for tackling various topicality arguments. “I’ll drive, you can backseat drive. We can leave on Wednesday, get there the day before the tournament.”

“What about your mother?” Erik asked.

This was an issue. “I’ll… ask her to take a cab to therapy that week,” he said slowly, knowing already that she wouldn’t, resigning himself to hard questions from her therapist the week after, questions about his fitness to take care of her, her fitness to take care of him. He was eighteen in two months, and it wouldn’t matter much after that. He’d dodged social services this long, he could do it a little longer. Erik didn’t seem convinced; he knew that Charles had been planning to fly out the Friday morning of the tournament so he could take her to her appointment the day before, but Charles suddenly found that he _wanted_ this road trip with Erik, these last glorious moments before summer and then college swallowed them up, with a terrible selfishness that so rarely possessed him. “Say yes,” he said—pleaded. “Come on, it’s our last tournament. Come with me. Say yes.”

“I’ll have to ask my mother,” Erik said, “but yes.”

— ⓧ —

They won the last tournament before State with a crushing victory against a tiny parochial school that, too, had one debate team that obsessively worked and prepared the way Charles and Erik had. Their opponents had made the mistake of directly contradicting their claims and arguing that the judge should prefer their evidence; Erik knew each and every piece of evidence he had selected for the plan, could defend each and every link between _not_ injecting financial stimulus in mutant communities and thermonuclear war, and could—and had—argued the fine details of recency, credibility, bias until their opponents were cringing into the ground. It was the sexiest thing Charles had ever seen. He didn’t tell Erik this, of course, only held up the trophy for Raven to take a picture for the yearbook and smiled, and smiled.

— ⓧ —

Erik loaded the tubs into the back of Charles’s sedan, then hugged his mother and clambered into the passenger seat; Charles’s wheelchair was riding in the back today and tomorrow. He had a cooler of “snacks” that were closer to full meals Edie had plied them with nestled up against Charles’s folded wheelchair. As they hit the highway, the conversation flitted to things that were, oddly, not related to debate. They got into arguments about the radio, about graduation (Erik was planning on skipping it; Charles thought that was a tragedy), about a book of poetry Charles had filched from Erik’s bedside table and Charles’s “wrongheaded but adorable” interpretations of it. It was fun. It was exactly what he’d wanted. He drank deeply from the water bottle he’d brought along, blasted the air conditioning, and asked Erik to pass him a bag of chips.

The huge, multi-lane highways ebbed and flowed into smaller, winding service roads that took them past rest areas that were all the same, the golden arches of McDonald’s and maybe a small picnic area, and the sun gleamed bright and unforgiving against Charles’s sunglasses. Erik, not wearing any, squinted into the light to navigate. Erik gave him hell for naming his car (Bonnie, after the state flower, because she was a tealish blue). Charles sang along to pop songs from this year that Erik mostly didn’t recognize because he lived under an evidence tub. They pulled into a rest stop when it got dark and slept in the car, the detritus of the fast-food burgers they’d had for dinner crammed into the glove compartment.

As he drifted off, Erik’s soft breaths rising and falling next to him, Charles thought that today had been perfect. A golden, glimmering, perfect day.

— ⓧ —

Charles opened his eyes. They’d cranked the windows down for air circulation, but the breeze playing across his skin was too cold for just the windows to be open. He turned his head and saw that Erik was sitting up, the passenger’s-side door open, his head tilted back as he examined the stars. There weren’t that many of them—the lights from the rest stop blotted most of them out—but enough to spin a dizzying web above their heads of light and night. “Why’re you,” he slurred. Erik turned his head a tiny bit to glance at him. Charles yawned. “What’re you doin’. Why’re you awake?”

“I woke up,” Erik said, so quietly he almost wasn’t moving his lips at all. “Didn’t want to wake you up, too. Sorry.”

“S’ok.” Charles scrubbed at his eyes. “Nightmare?”

“Mmm.”

“Just a dream,” Charles said around another yawn. “You should go back to sleep. Highway’s shit for star-gazing.”

“Mmm.” Erik didn’t seem like he was going to move for a second, but he eventually crawled back inside, closed the door, and lay down. “In Midland, my mom and I lived out way past the edge of town. When all the lights were out, and you gave yourself a little time to adjust, you could see stars for miles.”

“I used to be a Cub Scout,” Charles volunteered. Ignoring Erik’s soft huff of laughter and _Of course you were_ , he said, “They taught us celestial navigation. I was never that good at it, though. Could never pick out one star from the other.”

“You were right,” Erik said, apropos of nothing. “About me. I’ve never… kissed anyone.”

Charles turned his head, his heart pounding in his chest, suddenly feeling very awake. Across from them, someone pulled into the drive-thru of the 24-hour McDonald’s. This was the least romantic place he could imagine for such a confession, and yet suddenly also the most. “Really?” he asked, not mocking, just wonderment.

“Not really,” Erik said. He turned his head to look at Charles. The glare of streetlights on his pale eyes stole his breath away. “Never found someone who could put up with… all of this, I guess. It’s not easy for me, the way it is for you. I’m not… likeable like you.”

“It’s not easy for me,” Charles breathed.

“Everyone tells you kissing your debate partner is a bad idea,” Erik said, and then without further ado kissed him. Charles fell into it immediately. The lips moving against his, the taste of Erik and encroaching summer on his tongue—Erik was clumsy but confident, and Charles found it unaccountably moving, he wanted to scoop Erik up and hold him to his heart, he wanted to pry open his ribcage and make a home for Erik in there so that he would always be close, always be safe. It was simultaneously better and worse than anything Charles had ever imagined about kissing Erik. Above them, the stars might have exploded into fireworks for all he noticed or cared; he was consumed with the scent of Erik, the little sigh he let out against Charles’s lips, the way his fingers reached forward, the same fingers that spun a pen so roguishly during a debate, and laid, fluttering and nervous, against Charles’s jaw.

 _Now_ it was the most perfect day Charles could imagine.

They kissed, and kissed, hidden by the darkness, sheltered by the emptiness of the rest stop around them. And they drifted off holding hands over the clutch, as nearby, an owl warbled and watched over them.

— ⓧ —

The road:

Charles needed both hands to work the controls of his car, so Erik just left his hand on his thigh, which Charles couldn’t feel but which made him feel tingly and light-headed anyway. Erik wore Charles’s sunglasses perched on the crown of his head and battled the state map they’d unfurled, trying to spread it out over the dashboard without blocking Charles’s vision. They were playing a game now, sharing not-quite-secrets but things neither of them, telepathy aside, would have suspected about the other. “I could probably drive this car,” Erik said consideringly.

“You don’t know how to drive, Erik.”

“I don’t know how to _work a car_. I could probably drive,” Erik said. “Either way, this huge lump of metal gets propelled down the highway at speeds faster than anything in nature.”

“I’m not letting you use your powers on my car,” Charles said. “I’ve heard from your mother what you did to the last family car.”

Erik sniffed. “I was _fifteen,_ ” he said.

“Who you are at fifteen is just the essence of who you’ll be for the rest of your life,” Charles said.

“What a depressing thought,” Erik muttered. “Your turn.”

Charles thought about it. The last round had been a depressing one about their dead fathers. This time, he said, “I faked a rejection letter from Harvard.”

“Why?” Erik asked, not judgmentally, just curiously.

“I don’t want to go anywhere in the States. Before my dad died, we lived in Oxford most of the time. We only moved back to Westchester when my mum got remarried, you know.”

“I had suspected,” Erik said dryly. “Your accent isn’t very _New York State._ ”

Charles snorted. “I miss it. Oxford. I’m waiting to hear back from them, but. I want to get away. From my mother, from the responsibility of… making sure she stays sober, of being the one _responsible_ for her. I want to be anywhere else, but most of all Oxford.” He glanced at Erik, who was looking contemplatively into the rearview mirror. He knew it was childish of him, to try to avoid the difficult conversation of telling his mother that he wanted so badly to be rid of her that he was moving out of the country, but Erik didn’t pick at him for it. “What about you? You never talk about college. Don’t tell me you didn’t apply anywhere. You’re too clever not to go to college because you were obsessed with beating your old debate team.”

“I applied one place,” Erik said.

“And?” Charles said anxiously.

“I got in,” Erik said blandly.

“That’s great!” Charles considered honking for a moment, then thought better of it. This was Texas; you never knew who had a gun in their car. “Where are you going?”

“I don’t know if I’ll go yet,” Erik corrected him. “It’s… I wouldn’t laugh at you for wanting to go to Oxford, you know. I applied to Heidelberg.”

Heidelberg. The name was familiar, but not from the masses of college brochures under his bed, from his European History class. “Heidelberg… in Germany?”

“My father taught there before we moved to the States,” Erik said. “But I don’t know. About leaving my mother alone, if she’d move back to Germany with me, if I remember enough of the language… what I’d study, even.”

“Argumentation,” Charles said without missing a beat. “Mutant studies. Metallurgy.”

Erik huffed out a laugh. “Maybe.” 

“Poetry?” Charles asked.

“Maybe,” Erik sighed. “Can you choose my classes for me?”

“Only if you _go_ ,” Charles said. “You’re too good not to get everything you dream of.” He squinted out into the sunlight. “I… will you come see me at Oxford? If you go to Heidelberg, and I get in?”

Erik looked at him for a long time, then left a hot, lingering kiss on the rise of his cheekbone. It felt like the sun scorching the desert but setting the cacti into bloom. “Maybe,” he whispered, but in the way that really meant _yes,_ and Charles felt warmed through, and struggled to hide the grin that spread across his face like desert flowers unfurling.

— ⓧ —

Logan, in spite of his penny-pinching and desire to never stir himself for longer than it took to light a new cigar (the fire alarms in the debate room had long since been disabled), had gotten them a fairly nice double room, which they promptly ruined by pushing the beds together. They got to El Paso just as twilight was darkening the edges of the city, and had dinner at a diner where they argued, and argued, and argued some more, as a way to work off their nerves for tomorrow and transition from the faces they worn in paradise to the ones they wore at tournaments.

It turned out they had the same favorite book, but _very_ different interpretations of it. Erik showered while shouting over the shower spray the entire time how Charles’s claim that right eventually makes might in _The Once and Future King_ was wrong and idealistic, and how Arthur’s death ultimately proved that a system which revolved around a charismatic leader and identifying the best people to put in positions of power was ultimately doomed to fail without Arthur’s preternatural sense for knowing who to trust. Charles responded that Erik’s interpretation of Lancelot as cruel and unfeeling proved he had never been in love as he changed into his pajamas. Erik criticized Guenever as a misogynistic caricature of women; Charles defended her as being largely misunderstood and the most human, realistic character in the novel. Erik made a particularly eloquent point about war as a natural part of life based on Arthur’s examinations of the ants, and Charles almost came in his pants. An eminently normal interaction between them.

There was a chessboard set up in the corner of the room, and Erik carried it over to the bed, and they played as they talked, arguments over who understood Arthurian legend better devolving into memories of their first encounter with playing the myths, what they thought of the Disney _Sword in the Stone,_ which knight they had wanted to be growing up. And as the night wore on, Erik set the chessboard on the floor and they curled up next to each other and talked some more, about the tournament tomorrow and what else they had wanted to be when they grew up and what they had dreamed of last night, and Erik put an arm around Charles’s shoulders and tucked him into the curve of his neck and Charles’s hands slid around to rest on the narrow part of Erik’s waist and they breathed, they breathed, they breathed together. They didn’t have sex, but when the moon struck the sheets and bleached them white, white, white, Erik whispered into Charles’s collarbone,

_“Touching you I catch midnight_  
_as moon fires set in my throat_  
_I love you flesh into blossom_  
_I made you_  
_and take you made_  
_into me.”_

“That’s lovely,” Charles murmured into Erik’s hair. He yawned.

“Audre Lorde. ‘Recreation.’”

“Mm. Talk more poetry to me.”

Erik pressed a kiss to Charles’s temple and hesitated before he launched into a rolling spoken word poem of hills and valleys, political discontent and wintery hope. _“At least hold me, dear and close,”_ he finished, _“breathe in my fear and breathe out my woes,_  
_warm my blood with your blood, my toes with your toes,_  
_lie with me. Lie to me. Let us be animals slumbering in the night.”_

“Mm, I like that,” Charles said. “Who was that?”

Erik didn’t answer, just carded his fingers through Charles’s hair, and he dropped off before he could wrest an answer out of him.

— ⓧ —

State was like any other debate tournament, except… _more so_.

Teenagers milled around in their suits and heels and ties. The atmosphere of fun, of friendly competition, was gone—it was all deadly serious now, and competitors walked by with grim expressions as though they were attending a funeral, and could only hope it wouldn’t be theirs. It was another college campus, but just as finals were starting up, so college students in oversized hoodies and pajama pants mingled more thoroughly with the influx of high schoolers as they rushed on their way to office hours or the library. Charles and Erik set up in an large auditorium with velvet seats, just the two of them. Some teams had managed to send multiple people to State, and they clustered together like it was any other tournament; other pairs or competitors were alone, rehearsing to themselves or prepping for the start of the tournament. Today, Friday, would be for three rounds of debate only; the speech events would commence on Saturday.

Charles and Erik sat next to each other in the floor seats of the auditorium, not talking, not holding hands, but with shoulders pressed against each other, giving each other strength. Erik flipped through their blocks, obsessive as always. Charles twirled his pen, the human way, and wished his thoughts were threaded through Erik’s now; not to give them an unfair advantage during the debates, just to revel in the contours and planes of Erik’s mind, which shone and darted like a white-hot flame in a sea of flickering fireflies. There were people as intense as Erik, and as scrupulously moral, and as fiercely protective, and as clever and analytical, but Charles rather thought that only Erik put these all together, like gasoline and tinder and a flint and steel, so that he _burned,_ not just glowed like all the others, in the darkness.

Finally, it was time. Erik found them a map and their posted classroom assignments, and they sallied forth to face their opponents.

— ⓧ —

The first debates flew by.

That night, after a dinner of greasy tournament pizza, they curled up next to each other in the motel room and, instead of prepping for tomorrow, traded kisses until even Erik’s mind had faded to a lovely background hum of pleasure instead of worry and tension. They had to rise early tomorrow, and Charles had a vague notion that you weren’t supposed to have sex before battle or a big competition to keep the blood up, so neither of them pressed for more. Charles just tucked his nose into the curve of Erik’s neck and sighed, and Erik giggled as his breath tickled gently, and they fell asleep like that, fingers intertwined between them on the pushed-together beds.

— ⓧ —

Round 4 gave them a bit more of a fight, but when Charles saw Erik getting frustrated, this time, he could place a hand gently on Erik’s elbow and stroke his thumb down the crook of it and calm him down. They waited impatiently for prelim results to be posted, and advanced—they’d won three out of four debates, of course they’d advance. Midday hit. When they moved to the hall their octofinals room was in, the heat outside pounded down on them; Charles was sweating by the time they got back inside, and Erik was flushed dark with heat. High afternoon, and quarterfinals blinked away. A pause to tabulate the results. The rooms were getting crowded now, with parents and teammates who hadn’t made it to elims and coaches and even a handful of college students watching. Charles thought nothing of it; their little school couldn’t afford to ship out Logan, let alone Raven and the others. Until—

“Charles?” his mother’s voice asked, and he turned so quickly his neck twinged in protest.

“Mother?” he asked incredulously.

She was standing there in what, for her, passed for casual wear; a brilliant jewel-green frock with matching emerald jewelry. (Most of their remaining fortune was in his mother’s closet.) She looked lost, out of place. People were beginning to fall apart under the heat of the day and the stress of the tournament, but Sharon Xavier-née-Marko-née-Finley never had so much as a stray hair, and she stood out like a gleaming statue amid the increasingly raggedy high schoolers around her. “What,” Charles said, not entirely sure the stress wasn’t causing him to hallucinate, “what are you doing here?”

“Your partner invited me,” his mother said, a little shyly. Charles’s head whipped around so he could stare at Erik accusingly.

 _“Can I talk to you,”_ he hissed. Erik nodded. He was biting his lip and looked so nervous that Charles almost immediately forgave him, but Charles wheeled a distance away from his mother, not caring how rude it was, and made his voice hard and frigid as he demanded, “What the _hell?”_

“My mom can’t come,” Erik said self-consciously by way of explanation. “We don’t have the money. And, well, the way you talk about your mother… she’s sober now, isn’t she? I thought… you might like to have her here. So I told her to come for the semifinal round.”

Charles was _not_ going to tear up. “Fuck,” he said, stunned, wiping at his eyes. All right, he was tearing up. “Fuck, how did you _know_ —” And _Charles_ was supposed to be the telepath. All he’d ever wanted was for his mother to show _some_ interest. Any interest at all. And _how_ had Erik managed to get her to do this—how had he convinced her, cajoled her—he was some kind of miracle worker, a Xavier-whisperer—he scrubbed angrily at his face, not sure whether he wanted to shout at Erik or fall blubbering on his shoulder or fuck him senseless. “God, you’re lucky you’re cute,” he said finally, and Erik took that as the forgiveness it was and smiled tremulously. “Why semifinals? Don’t think we can win?”

“Of course we’ll win,” Erik said arrogantly. “I just didn’t think you’d want the pressure if she showed up for finals.”

“Get down here,” Charles growled.

“Are you going to kiss me or punch me?” Erik asked.

“I don’t know,” Charles said, and with a glance to make sure no one was watching them where they were sheltered in a doorway together, wound his arms around Erik’s neck and kissed him thoroughly, with the tongue thing that made Erik weak in the knees. They broke apart, Erik faintly gasping, and Charles’s hand slipped down his shoulder to squeeze Erik’s. He didn’t thank him. The lump in his throat prevented speech, the suppression bracelet on his wrist prevented telepathy, and Erik knew, anyway. Charles took a moment to gather himself, put back together the pieces of himself, before he wheeled out to face his mother, who was fidgeting with her handbag. She straightened the strap when she looked at him, a complicated expression crossing her face. He wondered what she could read on his own.

“Mother,” he said hesitantly, “Erik and I are about to compete. Would you… like to watch?”

“…Yes,” she said. “Yes, I’d like that, Charles,” and he led her to the classroom and found her a seat among the thronging competitors and coaches and opposing team’s loved ones and thought, _I have a loved one watching me debate,_ and Erik was waiting for him at the podium, and the panel of judges were settling in, and Charles wasn’t ready, but Erik was there and _his mother_ was there so maybe not being ready was okay. It wasn’t perfect, it didn’t change anything about her alcoholism or the way he was maybe leaving her to fend for herself while he went off and had his own adventures, it didn’t make everything all right. But he knew, as Erik took the stand to read their aff, that he would always remember this. This moment when he was in love and his mother was at his back and he could look back and see her smiling, confused but maybe— _maybe-_ just a little bit proud, and _they were going to win,_ he could feel it in his bones—and treasure it forever.

And they did. Win.

— ⓧ —

This, though, he should have seen coming.

The other semifinal match-up was SZABINA-GERRIT vs. FROST-CHERTOV. They had a 50-50 chance—worse, actually, given the reputation of Erik’s former school for turning out debate champions, like Frost… and like Erik—that they would have to face down the girl who had taken them apart with a single coolly precise sentence. They’d never actually debated them—Midland was just a hair too far away from Richardson to put them on the same circuit, and the one time they had them down had ended in a double disqualification—but would Emma and Azazel even need to use strategy to take down Charles and Erik, given the way Erik’s face went gray when he saw the finals posting? Charles took his hand—his mother had gone out for dinner—night was swiftly falling on the campus and the stars were coming out. “Breathe,” he said. “Just breathe.”

“I can do this,” Erik gritted out, but terror lay thickly over his eyes.

“You can,” Charles said. He cast about for the right words. He thought about what he would be afraid of, if it were him in Erik’s place. “It doesn’t matter what they know about you, you know. They don’t _know you._ Not like I do.”

It worked. Erik breathed slowly and steadily, and eventually his shoulders relaxed. Streelights lining the tree-shaded walk played off of the planes of his cheekbones, dazzled in his pale eyes. “They won’t do anything with everyone watching,” Charles told him reassuringly, and it was true; the spectators had become a zoo. Everyone wanted to watch the final debate of the most sophisticated event of one of the most rigorous tournaments in the country, especially the dozens of CXers who had been eliminated, who were hoping to pick up tips for next year or just wanted to see how it was done and would be taking strategy notes throughout the entire thing. This was no deserted hallway where they could goad Erik into throwing a punch. “I’ll be right by your side,” he added self-consciously, not sure how much comfort that was, but Erik relaxed further and tilted his head high.

“You’re right,” he said fiercely. “It’s stupid to be having a panic attack over seeing them again.”

“That’s not what I said,” Charles admonished. He reached out, straightened Erik’s perpetually crooked tie. “And you still don’t know how to do up a tie. Why are you _like_ this?”

“Self-mastery and dedication,” Erik said, and though he seemed like he wanted to, he didn’t turn on his heel and march off, trusting Charles to follow. Instead, he waited for Charles to wheel up to him, and they walked side-by-side into the classroom, filled with the low buzz of conversation, the panel of judges—coaches or college debaters—all talking to each other; they left the darkness outside and squinted into the fluorescent glare blazing out at them from the lights above. Art hung on the walls, not motivational posters or class-related reminders like at high schools. Behind them, crickets chirped a summer-song.

Emma and Azazel were arranging their evidence tubs on a set of pushed-together desks. Emma looked up when they came in, and flashed a cold, knife-sharp smile at Charles. Erik and Charles settled on the far cluster of desks and began to get themselves ready for the debate. Charles, again, wanted to reach out and wend himself through Erik’s mind, but the power dampener rendered him telepathically deaf and mute. Erik was moving slowly, in a sort of preternatural calm, his movements graceful as he unpacked files and arranged the ones they were most likely to need at the front of their tubs. This was only the most important debate of their high school careers, Charles thought a little hysterically. This was only everything Erik had been working towards since he’d first run from his old team and started obsessively working on a way to beat them, to prove that he was strong enough without Shaw. No big deal.

“Midland is going aff, Richardson is going neg,” the center judge, a strong-jawed blond coach with an accent even posher than Charles’s, said. “Whenever you’re both ready, you can begin.”

Emma Frost stepped to the makeshift podium holding a sheaf of papers—their opening argument. Her blond hair was pulled back into a severe ponytail to prevent frizzing, but she’d been running around all day debating, and it showed. Her heels clacked on the linoleum floor. She set the pages in front of her, with her timer in her hand, and smiled prettily at the judges. And then, without further ado, she launched into the debate.

“CURRENT POLICY FAILS MUTANTS CORTEZ legislation of mutants under 1964 Civil Rights Act was a _mistake_ mutants unlike human races do not fall into any coherent community majority of resources _unavailable_ or _ineffective_ for mutant problems results are poverty economic inefficiency global distrust ostracization MUTANTPHOBIA IS ON THE RISE BRADDOCK hate crimes increased _sixteen percent_ this year causes destablization of human-mutant relations leads to social unrest including economy-ruining riots loss of face on the world stage LINK: UNSTABLE US-WORLD RELATIONS LEADS TO GLOBAL CATASTROPHE BARRY—”

Charles stopped listening. Beside him, Erik had gone white as a corpse. The pen slipped from the air between his fingers and clattered loudly to the desk beside him. “What?” he whispered, knowing it was a potentially fatal faux pas to not be flowing their arguments right now, not caring when Erik looked like _that_ , like he’d just been devastated, like the world had broken apart before him and was crumbling in his cupped hands. “What is it?”

Erik looked at him blankly. “That’s the aff I wrote with… with Shaw,” he whispered.

The aff they had written together, the one that had been meant to crush anyone who stood in Erik’s path to State victory, before Shaw had been fired and Erik had fled, he meant. And now it was being turned on him, as a weapon—not just because it was a sound argument, though from what Charles had heard earlier it was airtight as a steel drum, it was a version of the case Erik and Charles had been running all year, economic stimulus for mutants, but possibly even stronger, the evidence and links flowing into each other neatly, the inherency obvious and the solvency clear—but because Emma and Azazel had _known_ this would hurt Erik, would throw him off his game, would disorient and distract him just as it was doing. It was as much psychological warfare as it was debate, and it was _cruel,_ and Charles _hated_ them, hated them, hated them. 

“Plan:” Emma said, her voice slowing to a smooth, steady roll so that the judges and her opponents could take down every word, “the US Federal Government should under the 1972 Communities and Families Act provide funding for protective services for mutants.”

“Erik,” Charles whispered, “Erik, we can forfeit if it’s too much—”

“No,” Erik gritted out. “I’ll be fine—I’ll be _fine_ —” but he was sweating and looked like he was about to pass out and _terrified_ , and Charles reached under the table and grabbed his hand. Neither of them were taking notes, which was _terrible_ form, but Erik already knew this aff back to front, and Charles had more important things to worry about than something as petty as _winning a debate._

“Come back to me,” Charles murmured. “Erik. You’re okay. Come back to me.”

“I’m gonna throw up—” Erik mumbled.

“Shhh,” Charles soothed. “Erik, we don’t have to do this. We can leave. We can go outside and not come back.”

And for a moment, Charles could see that Erik was really considering it. People would be confused, would be mocking about the team that had come all the way to finals to choke at the last moment, but _screw_ them—couldn’t they see that Erik was in pain so powerful it had turned physical?—and Charles would be there, the way no one had been there for him at Midland, to shield him from the brunt of it, to be leaned on when Erik had no one else. They could run away, to Oxford or Heidelberg, and never think of Emma Frost and Sebastian Shaw again.

“No,” he said finally. “No, I—I can’t let them win. Not this time. Not like this.”

“We won’t,” Charles promised.

“How do you know?” Erik asked plaintively.

“Because we’re the best damn team here,” Charles said, confidence brimming in him, dripping from every word, and he _meant_ it, he had never meant anything more in his life. If Erik could pull himself back from a trauma response in the middle of a debate, then Charles could win this debate for him. Erik cracked a shy, tender smile, and Charles smiled back at him. In the silence, Charles made promises that he would do his level best to keep, not all of them confined to the length of this debate, and Erik’s eyes crinkled around the edges like he could hear him, telepathy or no.

Belatedly, Charles realized that Emma had stopped speaking. A judge cleared her throat. “Richardson,” she said, loudly, as if this was the second or third time she’d tried to get their attention. “You’re up.”

“We’ll take prep time,” Charles said hurriedly, and turned back to Erik. “And we’ll _destroy_ them. Can I see your evidence?” he called over to Emma and Azazel, and Emma, smiling poisonously, as though she knew—and she probably did—that Charles and Erik had missed the entire second half of her argument—stalked over to them and handed over the pages the aff was printed on. Charles spread them out in front of them and hurriedly began to flow down the different arguments. “You know this argument better than anyone,” Charles said. “Give me a rundown.”

Erik took a deep, steadying breath, then looked at Charles, and his old intensity was back. “Standard economic stimulus aff,” he said. “Two advantages: first, the plan solves mutantphobia, mutantphobia in the US decreases legitimacy abroad, leads to the collapse of US hegemony, leads to thermonuclear war; second, the plan solves economic dysfunction caused by a mutant-human split by allowing mutant businesses to flourish without fear of hate crimes, otherwise the US economy will collapse, leading to thermonuclear war.” Charles was flowing the evidence as Erik talked, and he could already think up a few evidence-based arguments to make; the Barry evidence had a few detractors. They could turn the links—they had some evidence arguing that mutantphobia was the only thing that _sustained_ US legitimacy abroad, but that was a slippery slope—their best shot was—

Erik, his hands steady, pulled out a counterplan that they’d never run. They could find evidence stating that Midland’s plan would be insufficient to actually claim the solvency of their advantage, that only a more drastic measure—like theirs—could actually solve mutantphobia and economic dysfunction. It had its risks. Emma and Azazel would argue that the counterplan actually would cause _more_ mutantphobia and economic dysfunction or try to claim that the affirmative could do both, and then it would be on the strength of Erik and Charles’s rhetoric to hold the day. But they’d worked hard on this counterplan, for State, but also because it was something that both Erik and Charles believed in, one of the few political measures they actually agreed on. “And we can do the liberalism kritik,” Erik said.

“The liberalism K isn’t ready for competition.”

“I’ll read what we have during the 1NC and then finish it while you’re giving the 2NC.”

“That means you’ll have to tackle defending it during the 1NR,” Charles warned him. “Can you handle that?” Erik usually left the kritiks to Charles, who, while he didn’t believe in _every_ kritik they ran, could at least fake it in front of a judge.

“The K and CP combined is our best bet,” Erik said instead of answering. “I remember training with Emma; she always had a weakness for upper-level theory, she can’t debate liberalism versus radicalism at our level. And the counterplan is solid, Charles, you know it is. It’s what the framers of the resolution _meant_ when they wrote it.”

“That’ll cause its own problems,” Charles reminded him.

“You can handle it.” Erik’s eyes shone with a bright, challenging fervor, and Charles abruptly wanted to prove him right. Erik knew he’d won before Charles could even say anything; he pulled out the liberalism K and began to furiously annotate it, trying to get it ready for the first negative constructive speech he would be giving as soon as their prep time ran out. They took all eight minutes of prep time before the first speech; Charles could hear the rustle of people shifting in their chairs, surprised that a team that had made it all the way to State finals would make such an amateur mistake as taking all their prep time in one shot. But Charles had needed that time to calm Erik down and catch up after not listening to half of Emma’s speech, and besides, they worked so well together, not even having to listen to each other’s speeches, knowing what the other would say before they even said it themselves, they didn’t _need_ prep time, they made the most of every minute of every debate.

Two sets of beeping cut them off just as Charles finished whispering to Erik that he thought Azazel was the kind to try and turn the counterplan by using the kritik, and Erik was nodding, scribbling notes, not for his next speech, but for his first rebuttal. They were working whole speeches into the future, and the outlines of the debate to come fell into place behind Charles’s eyes like the bright colored lines of the flow. That was the signal—Charles’s timer and the judges’ timer had gone off at the same time, signaling the end of their prep. Erik stood fluidly and moved to the podium. He took a deep breath.

And Charles sat back and watched as Erik systematically dismantled every plank of Emma and Azazel’s argument. He decried the Barry evidence; he made the claim that their advantages were contradictory, that ending economic dysfunction would actually cause _more_ mutantphobia; and then he spread out their counterplan and their kritik and read out a blistering alternative to the plan the affirmative had presented. The liberalism kritik accused the affirmative of buying into a neoliberal ideology which thought that economic prosperity was the end-all be-all of well-being and which would eventually lead to a collapse of capitalism and global catastrophe. Charles, prepping his own speech, had to stop for a moment as Erik got to the counterplan. Chills prickled at him. They’d worked so hard on this, and now it was finally coming to fruition.

“COUNTERPLAN,” Erik read, loudly and clearly the way Emma had read the affirmative’s plan, “MUTANTS WILL BE RECOGNIZED AS A PROTECTED CLASS BY THE US FEDERAL GOVERNMENT.”

Azazel and Emma were flowing furiously, Emma’s pretty face twisted into a scowl, Azazel’s expression blank but his knuckles tight on his pen. His tail was paging through their evidence tubs, looking for evidence to refute Erik’s arguments. When Erik was done, they took two minutes of prep time themselves, most of which they spent arguing furiously. Charles couldn’t help but feel superior; he and Erik worked like a well-oiled machine, no matter how much friction was between them when they weren’t debating. They fell into each other’s orbits like they’d been engineered for each other, Erik handing Charles the file he needed before he was finished describing it, Charles slipping pieces of evidence to Erik just before he needed them while he was giving his speeches.

After a brief cross-examination, with Emma gritting her teeth throughout every question she asked and Erik staying steady, steady, the whole time, Azazel made a somewhat flaccid argument about their counterplan causing even more mutantphobia than the plan or the status quo, and then launched into the real arguments. “TURN,” he declared—he was a fast spreader, maybe even faster than Erik—”LIBERALISM K INVALIDATES CP,” and then made a claim about how the _most_ neoliberal idea that had been thrown out in the whole debate was the one of “protected class.” Charles wasn’t sure how Erik was going to rebut it, but he trusted him. 

Emma and Azazel went with a theory argument to disarm the counterplan, arguing that because it fell under the resolution, the negative team was directly impinging on their rights as the affirmative team. In order for a debate to be won, the debate first had to be _fair_ —many a debate was lost and won on the question of whether a team had landed a _fair_ argument—and the aff team always started off as at a disadvantage, since the neg team could pull their arguments from _anywhere,_ while the affirmative was limited by the scope of the resolution. To allow the negative team access to arguments that fell under the resolution, Azazel argued, totally destroyed the values of fairness and education, so the judges _must_ vote for the affirmative team. Fairly standard. Charles had a dozen blocks for this argument already picked out for his constructive speech.

And when the 2NC rolled around, Charles wheeled to the makeshift podium of textbooks and evidence tubs, which was too tall for him, spread the speech he had been frantically preparing on the desk next to it, and started to read.

He was in charge of defending the counterplan and the on-case arguments. They’d gotten into a “prefer our evidence” spat where Azazel had pointed out that the Barry evidence had been updated since the detractors Charles and Erik were citing, and Charles spent a little bit of his time on that, expanding on the arguments that Erik had introduced which suggested that Barry belonged to an old-school cluster of economists that was working from a paradigm that had reigned at the height of the Cold War and was all but irrelevant now. Charles read his blocks, standard arguments that counterplans that fell under the resolution were valid, and then, off the cuff, made a somewhat quaint argument that anyway the counterplan _didn’t_ fall under the resolution, because declaring mutants a protected class wouldn’t _increase their rights_ but instantiate an entirely new set of rights; transformation, not addition. He doubted anyone would buy it, but Emma would have to spend time rebutting it anyway, and that was more time she didn’t spend on their actual substantive arguments.

Immediately after the 2NC was the 1NR; Erik read his shorter five-minute rebuttal speech right after Charles finished their longer eight-minute-long constructive. In the rebuttals, blocks still played a role, but much less of one; much more of the speaking was extemporaneous now, speeches a soldered-together contraption of half-sketched outlines and whatever came to mind during the timeframe.

Erik spoke quickly, but now he was making eye contact with the judges, barely glancing down at the speech he’d outlined for himself directly onto his flow. Charles knew he should be preparing for his own rebuttal. But he took a moment to watch Erik, both to know which arguments he would need to carry forward, and to appreciate the sure poetry of him at the podium. “The affirmative team has claimed the liberalism K for themselves, and so conceded the validity of it,” Erik said. “But aff is wrong in suggesting that protected class is _more liberal_ a concept than economic stimulus; even if you buy ‘shades of liberalism,’ protected class is one of the most radical innovations to USFG legal system. Civil Rights Act, 1964, does away with the concept of ‘equality under the law,’ one of the most fundamental tenets of neoliberal governance; and therefore the CP does _not_ fall under the resolution because ‘protected class’ directly contradicts the idea of _individual human rights_ which is the cornerstone of liberal policy with the innovation that is _group rights_ —”

Charles began to grin. He cast a glance over at Emma, who was tugging at the end of her ponytail like Erik was a fly she could flick away, and Azazel, who was flowing desperately with his right hand while his left tapped nervously at the desk. He looked over at the judges, who were, in spite of themselves, nodding as Erik continued to quickly but steadily move through each argument on his flow with the force of a bulldozer or wrecking ball, some man-made synonym for a force of nature.

And he knew, even before Emma rose to give her second speech, that they would win.

— ⓧ — ⓧ — ⓧ —

“Erik,” Charles said, his voice curling over the nooks and crannies of Erik’s name like a warm gust of air, and Erik closed his eyes to savor the sound of it before turning around and smiling faintly at Charles.

“Admiring yourself in the gleam of the trophy?” Charles said lightly.

“No,” Erik said. “Just gloating.” He moved away from the massive first place trophy they’d won at State, enthroned forever in Logan’s display case, and toward Charles, who looked nervous. It was the end of the year. No more debate practices, but they still met every day in the speech room and headed over together to the public library, where Erik worked morosely on calculus homework and Charles bent over his final project for English Literature and they distracted each other with kisses more often than not. Charles looked nervous. “What is it?” Erik asked. The walk to the library was much quicker without the encumbrance of evidence tubs, but sometimes he missed having something to do with his hands. A pen floated out of his backpack and began to twirl around his fingers in midair.

Charles shook his head. “It’s not important.” Erik frowned, but before he could say anything, Charles barreled on, “Did you know Jean came up to me at lunch today and asked if you and I could teach her and Ororo the basics of debate before we graduated?”

“I didn’t know she was interested,” Erik said. “She seemed happy enough doing duets with what’s-his-name.”

“Scott,” Charles said reprovingly. “You’ve been on a team with them this whole year and you still can’t remember their names?”

“I barely even remember _your_ name,” Erik teased, and Charles laughed, a breathless joyous sound that made Erik’s heart leap about in his chest.

“I think our great victory has inspired them,” Charles said when he’d caught his breath. “When was the last time this school actually won something?” Certainly it hadn’t been during the year both of them had spent during this school; Richardson High was mediocre in sports, mock trial, theater, and music, as a sink for mutant families or low-income humans. Erik shrugged and followed Charles down the wheelchair ramp as they set off toward the library. They bickered briefly about whether their Government teacher’s—who both Charles and Erik had, but in different periods—opinions on Mutant Registration were enough to sue for discrimination. Through it all, Erik felt the warm presence of Charles at the back of his mind, not poking around, just basking in the tenor of his thoughts and emotions, more empathy than telepathy.

They sat at their usual table to “study,” but it was a fine day of near-summer and the pretense collapsed quickly. They were both, as the parlance went, nerds, but also seniors, and the sky was a gorgeous gauzy blue and dandelions were flickering back and forth in the flowerbeds in front of the library. Erik sat on the back rest of the stone bench in front, his feet on the seat, Charles settled in his chair beside him, and wind coiled around the two of them teasingly as Erik tried to explain the elusive difference between good poetry and bad poetry and Charles enthusiastically shared the gossip about what Raven and Hank had been caught doing in another school’s broom closet.

They walked to KFC when they got hungry and split a bucket of fried chicken. Erik watched Charles lick grease off his fingers like he’d been raised in a barn and not a posh manor and then deliver a wicked, impertinent grin that made Erik’s cheeks flush red and his gaze dart away, when he’d never avoided anyone’s gaze in his life. But as the sun sank down beneath the houses, Charles grew anxious again, his eyes darting to the backpack abandoned behind his wheelchair. Erik suffered through another forty minutes of this before he reached down and snatched it up and started rifling through it.

“Hey!” Charles said, startled, and began to grab for it uselessly; Erik figured that if he really wanted it he’d force Erik to drop it with telepathy, so he continued to dig between Charles’s _Jane Eyre_ textbook and his physics notes. He felt something that was out of place—a letter—and plucked it out. It was a plain white business envelope, but there was a dark blue logo in the return address corner.

Oxford.

“It came in the mail this morning,” Charles said quietly. Erik checked the seal. Closed. “I haven’t—I wanted to be with you, when I found out—but I kept chickening out.” He laughed a little. “Isn’t that funny? I feel as if I’ve pinned all my hopes and dreams on the future we talked about, me at Oxford and you at Heidelberg, and if I don’t get in now I’ll be devastated.”

“Do you want me to open it?” Erik asked quietly.

“No,” Charles said. “I’ll do it.” He reached for it and Erik laid it in his palm. Charles stared at the little envelope for a while. “Aren’t acceptance letters supposed to be bigger?” he asked.

“Shut up and open it,” Erik said.

Charles tore into it. His mind thrummed quietly in the background of Erik’s as he unfolded the letter. Erik could practically feel the thrum of his heartbeat, but not surprise or joy or devastation or anything. “Well?” he asked impatiently.

“I got it,” Charles said quietly.

Erik whooped and kissed him, and Charles kissed back dazedly, made more difficult because of the grin that was already spreading on his face. Erik kissed around it, peppering Charles’s jaw, cheeks, nose with gentle fluttering kisses that made Charles make pleasant noises in the back of his throat. “I _knew_ it,” Erik crowed triumphantly when he came up for air, “I _knew_ they couldn’t resist you.”

“Well, of course not,” Charles sniffed, though his smile still seemed stunned. “I converted _you_ to my side, didn’t I? The Oxford Admissions Board was a piece of cake after that.”

Erik let that slide and continued kissing Charles. It was silly, he knew. He was a pragmatist. In all likelihood their relationship would burn out when they went to college, the way the vast majority of high school romances did. They would be going to school countries apart—Erik had accepted the offer from Heidelberg last week—meeting new people, not having time for each other, maybe debating. But for a moment, the future seemed lit up and luminous: Charles by his side, and Erik felt giddy for it, he felt dizzy with the utter possibility of it all.

Working and saving up for flights to Oxford. A small apartment, ground floor, where he or someone else could watch the city bustle and flourish outside a picture window. Introducing Charles to where he’d grown up, continuing the friendly rivalry between their schools and their selves, being tangled up in each other’s sheets and rushing off because one or the other had to catch a flight back home. Erik could think of literally nothing else in the world he wanted more. Behind his eyes, Charles’s joy and surprise was still going off like fireworks. Erik kissed him a last time, and said, “This calls for celebration. Let me take you out to pizza.”

There was a tiny pizzeria, Piece’a Pizza, a few streets down from the library, not wheelchair-accessible, so Erik went inside and placed their order and they ate outside on the patio. Laughter bounced between them, fizzy and bright, as they made plans about their future, plans that at the time seemed as constant and unshakable as scientific fact, as setting of the sun above them. In the years to come it would be harder. Distance was a powerful foe, and so was reason—they’d only known each other a year, surely they’d exaggerated the pull they’d felt toward each other, their pure compatibility, surely what was important was the now—but love equal to it, with some effort and patience.

They hadn’t said it yet. Love. They would before the summer was out, amid the quiet din of summer, the croaking of frogs and the buzz of mosquitoes and the sticky-sweetness of sweat on their skin. But for now, they kept that secret, even from each other, even with the telepathic bond humming between them, and talked only of a future that encompassed that word, but more too, genetics and literature, debate and poetry, chess and books and long-distance phone calls. For now, they still had the whole future ahead of them, and at one point Erik tilted his head back and reflected on how much he’d won, how much he’d fought for and how much had been given to him, and felt for Charles’s hand, which was warm and gentle in his, as the first stars began to streak across the night.

**Author's Note:**

> As far as I know, Mark Doty and Audre Lorde are not mutants. Poems are “Difference” and “Recreation” respectively. Thanks to [Librata]() for helping out with the poetry of this fic. Thanks to the amazing [Amaranth42](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Amaranth42/pseuds/Amaranth42) for writing a sweet, genderswappwed debate fic... which I promptly turned into something... not that. 💛
> 
> AMA @ [tumblr](https://midrashic.tumblr.com). Also, come chat us up on the [X-Men X-traordinaire Discord server!](https://discord.gg/7HyhZ5R)
> 
> My comment policy boils down to one thing: **Please comment.** You. Yes, you in particular. If you would like examples, a simple heart emoji or “+kudos” now that the multiple kudos function has been disabled are hugely appreciated. Your comment does not have to be profound. Your comment does not have to be long. If all you have the energy for is the heart emoji, i appreciate that much more than a kudos or a bookmark. A kudos is not interchangeable with a short comment that says “great job!” or something similar. I always respond to comments. Comments on old works are just as valuable, maybe even more so, than comments on new works. If you feel like your comments mean less than those from people I regularly interact with, you’re wrong; comments mean more from a stranger. I would prefer a “please update” to no comment. I would prefer a short comment to no comment. I would prefer criticism to no comment. Comments keep writers writing and in the fandoms you love. **Please comment.**


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